By year’s end, it had topped several critics’ and readers’ polls as best album. The band’s second and last album, Closer (recorded just prior to Curtis’ death and released shortly afterward by Factory), became one of the fastest-selling independent-label LPs in British New Wave history. According to his songs, he’d looked upon the horror of mortal futility and understood the gravity of what he saw: “Heart and soul – one will burn.” In the U.K., Curtis’ suicide conferred Joy Division with mythical status. According to journalistic accounts, he’d been depressed over failed love. In fact, it’s a vision so steeped in deathly fixations that it proved fatal: on May 18th, 1980, the group’s lead singer and lyricist, Ian Curtis – a shy, reticent man who’d written some of the most powerfully authentic accounts of dissolution and despair since Lou Reed – hung himself at his home in Macclesfield, England, at the age of twenty-three. The music of Joy Division – an art-minded English postpunk band that initially struck reviewers as a tuneful version of PiL – sets forth an even more indelible vision of gloom.
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