Joy Division "Unknown Pleasures" (1979)

This is a beautiful, haunting, classic album by a great band with a controversial name.

Unknown Pleasures is the first album by Joy Division, released in 1979. It was produced by Martin Hannett and recorded at Strawberry Studios, Stockport, England. The front cover image comes from an edition of the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Astronomy, and was originally drawn with black lines on a white background. It presents exactly 100 successive pulses from the first pulsar discovered, PSR 1919+21 (often referred to in the context of this album by its older name, CP 1919). The cover design is credited to Joy Division, Peter Saville and Chris Mathan. The back cover of the album contains no track listings, leaving a blank table where one would expect the listings to be.

Joy Division refers to a group of women used as sex slaves in Nazi concentration camps, as depicted in Ka-tzetnik 135633's 1955 novel The House of Dolls. In the novel, the Joy Divisions were groups of Jewish women in the concentration camps during World War II who were kept for the sexual pleasure of Nazi soldiers, guards and favored prisoners. The band's name reflected a desire to challenge taboos, and this choice, along with Sumner's adoption of the surname Albrecht, garnered the band criticism for their perceived insensitivity. Accusations of neo-Nazism, a charge the group denied, dogged them for the remainder of the band's career. These accusations resurfaced after Joy Division broke up and reformed as New Order, a name sometimes interpreted as a reference to Adolf Hitler's speeches promising "the new order of the Third Reich", although the band have stated they got the name from a newspaper article on the new society the Khmer Rouge had envisaged for Cambodia.

***