Sub-Culture, Not Substance: Defending the Raw Pulse of New Order
What's a music hill you're willing to die on? That one subjective hill (because, c'mon, taste is objectively objective) where the divvy, glaikit masses, most born after the music event in question, line up to beat you with their Hot Topic pseudo-Docs or offend you with their Amazon-purchased band Tees? I'll be honest, seeing someone born after 1983 and wearing a Misfits shirt is jarring. Yes, I know they 'reformed' in '95, but Graves is no Danzig and I digress...
I've actually got a lot of hills I'm willing to die on, being the contrary soul that I am, but nobody wants a bulleted list. (You don't, right? Right?) But recent events—ok a single, perhaps unexceptional event—brought one of my hills into sharp focus for me, and with cathartic intent I made a comment about my realisation in a Facebook group. (I am also very brave.) I got some nice comments back. (Er, what?) To which I responded and had good conversations. (Much to my surprise, there was no hill-dying, which is a weird experience online in 2025.) I found the whole thing interesting and, yes, depurative. So, as I like pontificating, that's how we got here.
In the ever evolving, always shifting universe that is music, it really is hard to make a defensible case that one particular thing, be it a song, an album, a singer or group, or even a genre, is the best. It's actually much easier to make declarative statements on what is the worst and back those asseverations up with evidence. Don't worry, I will get to that. There's a lot of crap in music and its growth is exponential. And yet, I am willing to cross that line and make bold assertions because I am Gen X and an Aries, to wit I know what good music is and I'm rather pushy with my facts (opinions).
Back to my hill.
New Order's 1985 LP Low-Life is the absolute summit, the crown jewel in their catalog.
Bold. I know. And perhaps not universally accepted.
Don't get me wrong, I love the bolt-from-the-blue energy of Power, Corruption & Lies and Technique has its undeniable sun-soaked swagger, all Ibiza fever dreams and hooks that pull you under like a riptide. But Low-Life? That's where it all crystallizes into something bruised, beautiful, and unbreakable.
Low-Life is the album where New Order stopped just mourning their Joy Division roots and started dancing with their ghosts. It's got that hazy, introspective swirl, all brooding synth washes and hooks that snag your melancholy like a Cure b-side from the Head on the Door era. Think "Elegia," that sprawling instrumental: it's pure ether, echoing the dreamy drift of "A Forest" or the epic ache in Disintegration tracks, where the bass hums like a distant storm and everything feels suspended in blue fog.
Not that New Order ever went full goth cape-and-smolder like Robert, but Low-Life catches them at their most Cure-adjacent: post-punk roots bubbling up through the electronica, ghosts of Joy Division still rattling the chains before they fully shook them loose. Their earlier stuff like Power, Corruption & Lies leans harder into stark factory-floor funk (Blue Monday's no "Boys Don't Cry"), and Technique's too sun-bleached, all Madchester mirage. Brotherhood? Closer, maybe, with its polished shadows, but Low-Life's the rawer bruise, the one where they linger in the hurt instead of sprinting toward the light.
That's one of the things about 80s music that was so lovely. Cross-pollination was real: Cure's "The Walk" nicked that Blue Monday bassline vibe, and New Order tracks like "Dreams Never End" mirror "In Between Days" in their spring-loaded bounce. It's that shared '80s post-punk DNA, moody, melodic, made for midnights, love, and loss.
Low-Life wins for nailing the emotional gut-punch without tipping into outright despair.
There. I said it.
It was as much a revelation to 54-year-old me as to anyone and the epiphany came out of such a banal event.
It all started with a simple request. "Alexa, play 'Sub-Culture.'" Anyone who has a smart speaker and uses it to listen to music knows that if a song exists in more than one form and you ask for it just by title, said smart speaker will invariably pick your least favourite and, more often than not, the most objectionable and festy version. (We can set aside the completely wrong-song, wrong-artist, and wrong-genre that is also common with requests to our friendly AI assistants and leave that for another discussion of how we are either safe from Hollywood-esque Judgment Day or have already gone to AI hell and it's just a part of our torture.) Rather than "Sub-Culture" what I got instead was "Sub-Culture (Substance Edit)," that glossy 12-inch remix from the Substance 1987 LP.
Um, no. (Told you I'd get back to the worst.) That one's all smoothed out and stretched shiny for the club kids, gutted of every jagged edge that made the original bleed. It's like trading a switchblade for a butter knife. Serviceable, sure. But where's the fire?
I tried to fix things by immediately yelling, "Alexa, STOP!" And then reiterating my request. No luck. Apparently if you want the original "Sub-Culture" from Low-Life—the absolute pinnacle of their sound, with its raw, urgent pulse—you can't just ask for it because you invariably get "Sub-Culture (Substance Edit)." This is unnecessarily cruel.
Is this really a big deal?
Yes.
Because "Sub-Culture" is a last post-punk specter that goes straight into your veins. Bernard Sumner's vocals are world-weary and unvarnished. No frills. No safety net. Just truth. It's just better.
Also, I dated a girl who claimed that "Sub-Culture (Substance Edit)" was the superior song. She was wrong. I can't even describe how wrong she was and how much we fought over it. Thirty-five years later and having Alexa try to feed me the '87 remix was traumatic. That was the impetus. That's what made me realise how precious "Sub-Culture" and Low-Life and New Order and, in fact, so much of the music of my youth is to me. It was formative. It evokes my past. All of it. The good. The bad. The elation. The despair.
The nostalgia (or whatever you call that warm glow without tipping into schmaltz) attached to Low-Life is important, which makes its subjective value worth defending, if only in good fun. It's not just the music, it's everything attached to that music.
Low-Life was my first New Order LP, which I snatched up in 1985. I remember looking at the cover art and thinking, "Wow!" The Polaroid shots of the band are pure Peter Saville magic. He handled sleeves for tons of Factory musicians, including Joy Division and New Order. (He also lent his eye to Roxy Music, Wham!, OMD, Ultravox, Peter Gabriel, Martha and the Muffins, and more...)
As an aspiring artist and designer back then (and as a successful graphic artist today), I really admired his work. The Low-Life art marked a pivot from Saville's usual "concept covers," where he'd re-appropriate other art and design, reimagining it into something fresh and contextual. The Power, Corruption & Lies album art nails that vibe with the Fantin-Latour Roses painting overlaid in color-coded alphabet. But for Low-Life, Saville wanted to go with instant camera images for raw portraits. The band balked at first as they were uncomfortable with the idea of their faces on the front, but seeing the prints develop right there won them over.
That's all part of the story of Low-Life. And it is part of the why when I claim it is the best.
In the end, I'm not just defending Low-Life, I'm defending memory, aesthetic integrity, and the right to feel deeply about art that shapes us. That’s the real hill.
Fight me. Or better yet, put that old vinyl on the turntable (the only way to listen to it) and let it wash over you, and come back converted.
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