10 Albums to Get You Into Post-Punk Music

10 Albums to Get You Into Post-Punk Music The Gothic Rock Adjacent Picks The Cure - Disintegration (1989) Siouxsie and The Banshees - Juju (1981) Bauhaus - The Sky's Gone Out (1982) Swans - The Great Annihilator (1995) The New Wave Adjacent Picks TALKING HEADS Remain In Light Talking Heads - Remain in Light (1980) ASSOCIATES Associates - Fourth Drawer Down (1981) XTC - Black Sea (1980) The B-52's - The B-52's (1979) Art Punk Adjacent Picks TELEVISION MARQUEE MOON Television - Marquee Moon (1977) Wire - 154 (1979) MINUTEMEN DOUBLE NICKELS ON THE DIME Minutemen - Double Nickels on the Dime (1984) MISSION OF BURMA Vs. Mission Burma - Vs. (1982) 1. Joy Division - Unknown Pleasures (1979) The record that almost singlehandedly redefined punk music's potential and re-engineered its ethos into something greater, something with lasting permeance. Everything about "Unknown Pleasures" is a musical cavalcade of sonic perfection. Martin Hannett's exquisite, reverb drenched production where empty space is used to evoke mood and atmosphere. Peter Hook's groundbreakingly melodic bass work that resided where guitars once strove. Bernard Summer's angular and fragmentary guitars hanging back as existential set dressing. Stephen Morris' dance-groove drumming that added a pop appeal to the raw darkness that record inhabited. And of course Ian Curtis's forlorn, dread-induced, singularly unique vocals and lyrics, which drew upon poetry to craft depressive echoes etched from inside a collapse. Before "Unknown Pleasures", Joy Division were very much a standard punk rock band, but after, not only did they redefine their entire sound, they redefined an entire movement and popular music forevermore. Without "Unknown Pleasures", the dark, brooding, atmospheric instrumental experimentation of post-punk music forevermore would never be the same. 2. Gang of Four - Entertainment! (1979) The record that almost singlehandedly ushered in the future post-punk craze that was lifted out of post-punk's ephemeral shroud. Andy Gill played guitar like a man flicking a switch on and off -- with an effortlessly cool technical prowess -- stabbing chords into silence and yanking them back before they could resolve. Underneath, the rhythm section runs taut, unsmiling funk grooves you can actually dance to. The use of rhythmic muting, abrasive angular stabs, treble-heavy tone, and syncopated minor triad shapes all across this album was revolutionary for a punk record when it first released. The lyrics here dismantle love and leisure as more products on a shelf. It's the body and the seminar arguing in the same three minutes. Behind all of its boundary breaking sonic evolution, "Entertainment!" was unabashedly punk in every way: railing against consumerism, railing against colonialism and authoritarianism. A record with punk's ethos buried in its DNA, but arguing for something more in the genre's conviction. A seminal, revolutionary release. 3. The Raincoats - The Raincoats (1979) To this day, The Raincoats' debut is one of the most consistently underrated post-punk records of all time, but yet, it is an essential document for the genre, and a groundbreaking step forward. Nothing here is sanded smooth: the violin scratches, the voices tangle and drift out of tune, the whole thing wobbles like a bicycle ridden by four people at once. That looseness is the argument. Against rock music's clenched-jaw machismo, The Raincoats offered something collective, homemade, unbothered by polish. They turned amateurism into a stance and reset the question of who post-punk belonged to. Anna de Silva and Gina Birch are figures just as pivotal to the inception of post-punk's merits as Ian Curtis or Mark E. Smith. 4. Wipers - Youth of America (1981) One of my all-time favorite albums. A landmark moment for modern music and for the increasing development of post-punk's ethos. Building off of the uncanny energy of their purely punk rock debut, "Is This Real?", like Joy Division, Greg Sage and Wipers crafted a record that retained that spirit of unbridled, restless punk energy and contained its DNA within something bolder, bigger, and far more ambitious. The title track runs ten minutes, one riff spiraling into a fixed, hypnotic burn with more in common with drone music than three-chord fury. Working out of Portland, far from any scene, Sage built songs that felt vast and boundless. With punk rock's rebellious spirit of political protest fastened to post-punk's atmospherically dense and cold production with its angular guitar riffs, this is a record that other genres would spend the next decade catching up to with what Wipers had already left behind. 5. The Chameleons - Script of the Bridge (1983) The Chameleons are one of the most woefully underrated groups of all time. They often seem to get passed over in this genre by the likes of Joy Division, but they are just as essential, and they are their ow unique creature. They capture a sort of paranoid, high-depressive energy molded within the post-punk and gothic rock architecture with atmospheric arrangements and forlorn, urgent vocals that nail a particular sort of urban existential melancholy better than almost any band before them. Two guitars, soaked in chorus and delay, ringing out until they fill the whole horizon. Mark Burgess sings like someone calling across a distance, his bass carrying the melody the way Hook's did in Manchester a few years earlier. Where Joy Division found a cold room, The Chameleons found a cathedral. It is that same gloom pushed outward into something widescreen and aching, a blueprint shoegaze would later retrace. 6. The Fall - This Nation's Saving Grace (1985) If Joy Division is the predicator and forefather to the genre, then The Fall is the group that cemented those ideas and etched them in stone. The Fall have so many incredible records -- a vast discography that explores and tests post-punk's limits. But for beginners, there is no better place to begin than "This Nation's Saving Grace". It is the most accessible of their works, whilst retaining that apathetic, satirical, and nihilistic demeanor they are well known for. Mark E. Smith ran The Fall on repetition and spite: a rockabilly churn borrowed from krautrock, the same two chords chewed until they hypnotize, his voice snarling half-legible dispatches over the top. Brix Smith's pop instincts sharpen the racket without domesticating it. This is the most inviting door into a band built to resist you, a method that could run for decades on friction alone. 7. Killing Joke - Night Time (1985) No record better capture's post-punk obsession with atmospheric darkness and nocturnal coldness than Killing Joke's "Night Time". A revolutionary group for the genre, just as important in many ways to the building of its ideals as groups like Joy Division and Wire, Killing Joke's true distilled genius on "Night Time" is that of mood. The drums come in like a war ceremony; Geordie Walker's guitar isn't chords so much as a sheet of metal dragged across the mix. Here Killing Joke aimed their apocalypse at the radio and hit: "Love Like Blood" turns existential dread into anthem without blunting it. This is post-punk scaled up to fill an arena, the hinge where the genre's darkness swings toward industrial and the heavy years ahead. 8. Dog Faced Hermans - Hum of Life (1993) By the time everyone had declared post-punk dead, this Scottish-Dutch collective was still tearing it open by the seams and finding more uncovered treasures within. The Dog Faced Hermans arrived in the '90s as genre savants. Exploring the best of art-punk and post-punk through the no wave scene, with an unbridled sense of energy and chaos, extricating their anger with authoritarianism and colonialism into something simultaneously hard and playful. Marion Coutts's trumpet cuts across angular guitars; free jazz, folk, and noise rock fold into rhythms that lurch and swing. "Hum of Life" is proof the genre's restless nerve didn't die in the '80s -- it went underground and kept mutating, refusing to sit still long enough to be catalogued. This is one of the best kept secrets in the popular post-punk lexicon: a genuinely experimental record of pure anarchist punk energy. 9. Interpol - Turn on the Bright Lights (2002) "What if Joy Division but in 2002?" Interpol asked. To which the world resoundingly replied, "Yes." In the early 2000's, post-punk saw a widespread resurgence that would come to be known as the post-punk revival. A revival whose influence is still being felt today, with popular and niche bands alike still channeling its ideas into more far reaching expressions. Of all the bands and albums to come from this revival, no single work was more culturally definitive than Interpol's debut, "Turn on the Bright Lights". A record that defines the sound of music culture in New York City in the early 2000's, capturing the cold and depressive gleam that marred that city after the September 11 attacks. While it is an album that sounds like that time period and place, it is also a record that sounds principally out of time, and every member is firing on all cylinders to achieve that remarkable sound. Paul Banks sings in a baritone that carries Ian Curtis's ghost through a different, colder city, whilst still searching for something more there. Paul and Daniel Kessler's guitars bounce and reflect off of each other in the angular traditions of Television and Wire. Sam Fogarino's drumming carries a singularly pulse-pounding energy. Carlos D's hypnotizing bass lines stretch and weave melodically like Peter Hook's did decades earlier. The whole affair hums with a dark dread. What could have been pale imitation instead feels lived-in: proof post-punk could speak to a new century without dressing up as the last one. The culmination? The last leg of the track "PDA", where all of these ideas result in one of the most staggeringly beautiful arrangements in modern music. 10. Women - Public Strain (2010) Before multiple members of Women would go on to form some of the most defining indie groups of the current timeline (Preoccupations and Cindy Lee), they were already breaking apart post-punks conventions in the early 2010's and finding new ideas worth salvaging there. Chris Reimer played guitar like he was corroding it, dissonance and drone eating away at melodies half-buried in the permafrost. Recorded cold and dense, "Public Strain" sounds like a signal breaking up in a snowstorm, with songs that assemble themselves and then quietly fall apart. It dragged post-punk's frozen tension into the territory of noise and drone, and pointed the way for a decade of underground bands to come. It's final moment, "Eyesore" is simply one of the greatest songs ever made. Some Other Picks: This Heat - Deceit Joy Division - Closer The Fall - Hex Enduction Hour Have a Nice Life - Deathconsciousness Public Image Ltd. - Metal Box Pere Ubu - The Modern Dance Killing Joke - Killing Joke Virgin Prunes - ...If I Die, I Die The Fall - Perverted by Language This Heat - Health and Efficiency Suburban Lawns - Suburban Lawns Glenn Branca - Lesson No. 1 The Sound - Jeopardy The Slits - Cut Violent Femmes - Violent Femmes Public Image Ltd. - Public Image The Soft Boys - Underwater Moonlight Some Other Picks Pt. 2: The Pop Group - Y Wipers - Over the Edge Wire - Chairs Missing Ike Yard - Night After Night INU - Don't Eat Food This Heat - Made Available: John Peel Sessions The Gun Club - Miami The Feelies - Crazy Rhythms LILIPUT - LILIPUT Lydia Lunch - 13.13 Magazine - Real Life New Order - Movement The Jam - Sound Affects Mission of Burma - Signals, Calls, and Marches Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - Tender Prey The Fall - Grotesque Contortions / Teenage Jesus and the Jerks / Mars / D.N.A. - No New York Squid - Bright Green Field Some Other Picks Pt. 3: The Strokes - Room on Fire The Chameleons - Strange Times The Fall - Live at the Witch Trials Joy Division - Still Lizzy Mercier Descloux - Mambo Nassau Dog Faced Hermans - Those Deep Buds Have a Nice Life - Voids Joy Division - Substance The Chameleons - What Does Anything Mean? Basically The Birthday Party - Live 1981-82 Patricio Rey y Sus Redonditos de Ricota - Oktubre The Cure - The Head on the Door Black Country, New Road - For the First Time Preoccupations - Viet Cong Interpol - Antics Siekiera - Nowa Aleksandria Echo & The Bunnymen - Ocean Rain Disco Inferno - In Debt DNA - DNA on DNA Klaus Mitffoch - Klaus Mitffoch Kult - Posłuchaj to do ciebie Some Other Picks Pt. 4: This Mortal Coil - This Mortal Coil Throwing Muses - Throwing Muses Tones on Tail - Everything! Fontaines D.C. - Skinty Fia No Trend - Too Many Humans.... Rowland S. Howard - Teenage Snuff Film Iceage - Plowing Into the Field of Love IDLES - Joy as an Act of Resistance Jeunesse D'ivoire - Jeunesse D'ivoire Circle X - Prehistory The Cure - Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me The Sound - From the Lions Mouth The Jam - Sound Affects Lech Janerka - Historia podwodna Women - Women XTC - Drums and Wires Young Marble Giants - Colossal Youth Tuxedomoon - Desire Swell Maps - ...In "Jane From Occupied Europe"