For Fans of Post-Punk

Before Joy Division, rock melancholy was usually melodic, even pretty. Ian Curtis and his bandmates made it structural: the drums locked into a relentless lurch, Bernard Sumner's guitar slashed against the grain of the rhythm, and Peter Hook's bass carried the melodies from somewhere below the floor. 'Unknown Pleasures' and 'Closer' are not albums to cheer yourself up with. They are something rarer: accurate maps of certain kinds of inner weather. Every subsequent band that called itself dark owes a debt here.

The problem with most overtly political rock is that the politics drowns the music. Gang of Four solved this by putting the politics in the groove. 'Entertainment!' is a Marxist analysis of commodity culture that you can dance to. Andy Gill's guitar attacks rather than riffs; Dave Allen's bass is nearly funk. The lyrics are deliberately elliptical, which makes them last longer than slogans. Forty-odd years later the record sounds more urgent than most of what gets called protest music.

Wire's first three albums, 'Pink Flag', 'Chairs Missing', and '154', compressed punk into increasingly strange shapes. 'Pink Flag' had 21 songs in 36 minutes; some tracks lasted less than a minute. Rather than feeling rushed, this felt ruthless. Every note that survived had earned its place. Wire understood that editing was composition. They influenced everyone from Minor Threat to Elastica, but no one ever quite replicated the combination of economy and strangeness they arrived at by 1979.

Mark E. Smith led The Fall from 1976 until his death in 2018, releasing over 30 studio albums and maintaining a lineup turnover that made the band more like a force of nature than a group of people. The Fall are an acquired taste that, once acquired, becomes an obsession. Smith's slurred, sardonic vocals pile up literary references, regional slang, and surreal non-sequiturs over repetitive, motorik rhythms. 'Hex Enduction Hour' is the place to start: enormous, strange, and still completely alive.