The record’s first half is awash with slinking guitar-led anthems such as ‘Broken Promise’ and some of Hooky’s best bass work in the shape of ‘Way Of Life’, but the album’s latter half is where the party is. ‘Brotherhood’ shows a band in the midst of battle for their own soul – and it sounds tremendous. There are hints of what the band would become – there are pop melodies and hyperactive basslines aplenty – but it’s the singles from this era, like ‘Ceremony’, ‘Procession’ and ‘Temptation’ – absent from the LP – that gave off the encouraging signs. A band refusing to age gracefully and being all the better for it.īest viewed as a snapshot into the transition from Joy Division to New Order as opposed to than a debut album proper, ‘Movement’ was released 18 months after the death of Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis, and the band were almost certainly still finding their feet as what the new group were all about. ‘Tuttifrutti’ may well be one of their finest dance moments, while ‘People On The Highline’ and ‘Plastic’ are speckled with acid-house goodness. However, 2015’s ‘Music Complete’ found the band completely reinvigorated, toeing the line between carving out a mature sound but still being up for a mad one.

We’ll be honest, we didn’t think New Order still had a good album in them at this point. There are duff moments, for sure, but the bright spots like the experimental ‘Someone Like You’ and the wobbling ‘Slow Jam’ meant the group’s return from hiatus was a worthwhile, if only for a hot minute. One for the purists.Ī patchy return to their roots, but it does harbour one of the best New Order tracks this side of millennium in the shape of bone-crunching album opener ‘Crystal’. This is the sound of a group not knowing their place in the world, or knowing w hat New Order should sound like in the Noughties. The group dabble with a budget REM impersonation on ‘Hey Now What You Doing’ and the album’s second half nosedives after the dire ‘Dracula’s Castle’, finally skidding to a halt on the wishy-washy post-punk closer ‘Working Overtime’.

It was the first to be recorded without well-loved band member Gillian Gilbert and the last to be made with original bassist Peter Hook, who left in 2007. New Order’s eighth studio album found the group – as is often the case – in a state of flux.

Temptations albums chronology