For Fans of New Wave

Unknown Pleasures arrived in 1979 with the visual language of a seismograph and the emotional weight of something that could not be named. Ian Curtis's voice was not conventionally beautiful, and that was precisely the point. The record proved that despair, rendered with enough precision and craft, could become something close to euphoric. It remains the standard against which serious melancholy in music is measured.

Stop Making Sense is the greatest concert film ever made not because of the production values, though they are extraordinary, but because David Byrne and the band understood that talking about dread in a big suit while everyone dances is a perfectly coherent philosophical position. Fear of Music and Remain in Light take that idea and push it into Afrobeat, polyrhythm, and the kind of paranoia that makes you want to keep moving.

By the time Some Great Reward arrived in 1984, Depeche Mode had abandoned the cheerful synth-pop of their debut and started asking uncomfortable questions about power, submission, and faith. The decade's critics wrote them off as a singles act, but Songs of Faith and Devotion and Violator stand as two of the most fully realized records in the canon. The band built a cathedral out of drum machines, and it still echoes.

After Joy Division ended, the surviving members could have stopped. Instead they walked directly into the future: synthesizers, drum machines, and eventually the Hacienda, the Manchester club that gave birth to the next decade of dance music. Blue Monday is the best-selling 12-inch single in UK history. Power, Corruption and Lies holds together as a record in a way that still surprises people who only know the hit.