Joy Division’s Massive ‘Eternal’ Boxed Set Documents the Band’s Brilliant Evolution Over 16 Concerts: Album Review

Joy Division, the Manchester quartet whose brief existence helped shape the post-punk movement, managed to exert an outsized influence in a remarkably short span. Their austere, mesmeric compositions left a deep mark on indie rock, goth, industrial, and even electronic dance music. This fall, the group will be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame alongside New Order, the outfit that formed after frontman Ian Curtis ended his life in May 1980. There is a curious irony to the honor: today, Joy Division may be better known to the general public through T-shirts displaying the cover art of their debut album, Unknown Pleasures, than through the music contained on that record.

Their contemporaries frequently labeled Joy Division as post-rock or even anti-rock, and the band consciously rejected rock's customary posturing. On a live rendition of the Velvet Underground's "Sister Ray," Curtis can be heard mocking, "You should hear our version of 'Louie Louie' — woah." The punk scene that gave rise to them aimed to tear down the bloated rock establishment of the 1960s and '70s, yet punk itself remained theatrical and flamboyant. Joy Division headed the opposite way: somber attire, grave stage demeanor, bleak soundscapes, and even darker lyrics. Lines like "This is a crisis I knew had to come / Destroying the balance I'd kept / Doubting, unsettling and turning around" capture the unease that permeated their songwriting. That aesthetic would go on to influence the visual and sonic vocabulary of goth and industrial acts, from the Cure to Nine Inch Nails, even though Joy Division itself spurned the theatrics those genres adopted.

The sonic character of their two studio albums, Unknown Pleasures and Closer, proved as influential as the songs themselves. Producer Martin Hannett, a brilliant and deeply troubled individual, preferred guitars that resembled machinery or an angry swarm of hornets rather than a vintage Telecaster. The records sound alien, layered with peculiar effects, breaking glass, and distant industrial clatter. In one particularly bleak passage, Curtis's voice is double-tracked, with the second track being a whisper of him accompanying himself, heightening the sense of disquiet. Although the band drew on the Velvet Underground, David Bowie, Iggy Pop, and Kraftwerk, their albums resembled nothing that had come before. Hannett's methods were famously exacting — he once insisted on recording a drum kit in a stairwell to capture a specific ambience — and his production became a template for countless artists seeking to make rock music feel cold, spacious, and mechanical. The singer, whose lyrics often explored isolation and mental anguish, remains one of the most enigmatic figures in post-punk history, and his untimely death at 23 has only deepened the mystique surrounding the band.

Live recordings reveal a different band altogether: a bruising, confrontational rock group. The studio murk lifts, replaced by Bernard Sumner's snarling guitar, Peter Hook's punishing bass, and Stephen Morris's thunderous drumming, while Curtis's roar distorts the PA during the loudest passages. Much of that raw force surfaces on Eternal, a sprawling new boxed set spanning 14 CDs and two DVDs, compiled from 18 performances (including a couple of soundchecks) across the band's 14-month peak. Several recordings suffer from rough fidelity despite the producers' efforts, and only a handful meet typical live-album standards — though anyone venturing this deep is likely inured to such flaws. Many shows have circulated before, and nearly all have existed as bootlegs for decades, dating from an era when almost every English concert had at least one audience member with a portable cassette recorder, selling tapes at open-air markets on weekends or trading with fellow collectors. Most of these recordings stem from such sources, alongside a few soundboard cassettes and more professional captures. The Amsterdam, Birmingham, and Manchester Factory shows stand out for quality and performance, though each has flaws; the DVDs include long-available BBC performances plus concert and soundcheck videos strictly for obsessives.

A 16-disc Joy Division collection might sound like a mental-health hazard, yet because these are mostly energetic concert recordings, they feel less grim than much of the studio output. The band's ever-shifting setlists — drawing on an unusually large repertoire for such a young group — add to that. They might open with an obscure instrumental, or with "Love Will Tear Us Apart" (unreleased until after Curtis's death), or the dirge-like "I Remember Nothing." While arrangements usually stayed fixed once perfected, surprises abound: an unexpectedly uplifting early version of "The Eternal" with markedly different music, and a stumbling "Love Will Tear Us Apart" where Curtis tries rhythm guitar (Sumner on keyboards), realizes he can't play and sing simultaneously, and admits, "As you can tell, we haven't rehearsed in a while," before laughing. For listeners unfamiliar with the band's live reputation, these moments offer a rare glimpse of humor and humanity behind the oft-repeated image of four solemn young men from Salford.

Above all, it's riveting to hear the band's creative explosion unfold over just 14 months, presented chronologically, across good nights and bad, as increasingly stunning new songs appear — some of the most beautifully haunting music of their generation, until one member could bear it no longer. They were astonishingly young; the oldest at the time of Curtis's death was just 24. The sophistication and darkness of the music, especially the lyrics, defy comprehension for such youth. Even their prettiest songs — "Love Will Tear Us Apart" and "Atmosphere" — are steeped in despair; "Means to an End" has a monstrous groove so menacing you want to dance but feel you shouldn't. The most intense set here is almost certainly the band's final concert, in Birmingham on May 2, 1980, first issued on the posthumous compilation Still. Audience reports describe Curtis in poor health, barely finishing the show, yet his performance is harrowing: a 23-year-old man, two weeks from suicide, singing passionately on "New Dream Fades": "The strain's too much, can't take much more / I've walked on water, run through fire / Can't seem to feel it anymore." As with all such art, it's impossible to separate genuine impressions from the ensuing myth and the knowledge of what loomed ahead. Simon Armitage notes in the liner notes that if Curtis's death cemented Joy Division's funereal image, it also "fixed their legacy in amber," for better and worse. Little wonder the pristine, pioneering electronic pop the three survivors made as New Order often featured lyrics and vocals verging on triteness; they had glimpsed the other side and presumably had no wish to return. Eternal is unmistakably for obsessive fans, but it captures Joy Division's brilliance evolving in real time and preserves some of the most beautiful and challenging music of its era.