Joy Division booked three weekends at Strawberry Studios in Stockport in April 1979 and came out with a debut that sounds like a room much bigger than the four people standing in it. Factory Records put it out on 15 June that year.

Martin Hannett is the reason it sounds that way. He worked the studio as an instrument, favouring space and separation over the force the group carried on stage, and the unconventional methods he used there gave the record its cold architecture. Drums arrive from somewhere down a corridor. Bass carries the melody instead of following it. Guitar hangs at the edges in thin, glassy lines, and the vocal sits low and near, closer to speech than to rock singing.

Peter Saville supplied the other half of its reputation. No band name on the front, no title, just a white plot of radio signals from a pulsar on black, a scientific diagram doing the work of a portrait. The image has long since escaped the record and turns up on people who have never played it.

Gothic rock claims the album as a founding text, which fits the mood but undersells the discipline. Nothing here reaches for theatre. The playing stays tight and unhurried, the arrangements leave gaps on purpose, and the whole thing runs at the pace of a long walk home.