Behind One the Greatest Post-Punk Songs Ever Recorded

The Ian Curtis whose torch singing floats above the high bass and glistening synths of “Love Will Tear Us Apart” is hardly recognizable as the guy who sang “She’s Lost Control” or “Dead Souls.” It makes sense that the song was a non-album single since it strikes out in such a different direction from the music the band had released on its first album, Unknown Pleasures, or that would characterize their next and last, Closer.

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Two decades after its release NME named it the greatest single of all time—a claim that’s somehow both preposterous and plausible. It’s also some of the last music that Joy Division ever made: by the time the single came out, Curtis was dead by his own hand and the remaining members, who had vowed to break up the band if any of the founders left, would shortly form a new one—New Order.

New Order was a terrific band—or are (as of this writing in 2025, they’re touring again). But Joy Division was simply transcendent. The difference is Ian Curtis. And at the time he was writing “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” his life was collapsing in on him.

And at the time he was writing “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” his life was collapsing in on him.

Punk and post-punk had an almost reflexive distrust of the pop love song. Joy Division’s first chart hit, however, wasn’t born out of belligerence, but heartbreak. Yes, the song’s title is a bit of a piss take: squeaky-clean husband-and-wife team the Captain and Tennille had a #1 hit in 1975 with “Love Will Keep Us Together,” and while that song, or at least the optimism it channeled, did keep its performers together for nearly four decades, Curtis seems to have had little time for its saccharine “just say no” prescription for the seven-year itch.

Not that Curtis was philosophically opposed to the nuclear family: he married at age nineteen, and he and his wife, Deborah, had a child while the band was in the studio putting the finishing touches on Unknown Pleasures. But life on the road was hard on him, and he became emotionally involved with the Belgian journalist Annik Honoré. (Honoré always insisted that the relationship was platonic.) And that new love at least played a part in tearing Mr. and Mrs. Curtis apart.

The touring life was difficult for other reasons, as well. One of the band’s best-known songs, “She’s Lost Control,” is based on Curtis’s experience working with an epileptic girl in his civil service job as a caregiver. About the time he wrote the song he discovered that he, too, suffered from the condition, and his seizures became progressively more frequent and more severe; his flailing stage dance started to seem more than just abstract, and grand mal seizures sometimes brought Joy Division shows to a premature close.

Curtis probably also suffered from bipolar disorder, which was only compounded by the rigors of touring on a shoestring budget. By the time he wrote “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” all these forces—depression, epilepsy, isolation, and romantic strain—were pressing in on him with intolerable urgency; Deborah had filed for divorce, though Curtis pleaded with her to reconsider. On May 18, 1980, on the eve of Joy Division’s first US tour, Curtis hanged himself; he was twenty-three.

On May 18, 1980, on the eve of Joy Division’s first US tour, Curtis hanged himself; he was twenty-three.

Like so many British bands, Joy Division formed after seeing the Sex Pistols in the summer of 1976. If they originally set out to be punks, though, it didn’t last long. Peter Hook developed a distinctive style of playing his bass, wonderfully melodic and way up on the neck so that the pitch and timbre are close to that of a six-string guitar. Indeed, in the opening bars of “Love Will Tear Us Apart” Hook plays an homage to Pete Townshend’s opening of “Pinball Wizard” from the Who’s 1969 rock opera Tommy: bass player as guitar hero.

Another aspect of their music distinguishing Joy Division from the punk bands that initially inspired them was the motive force behind their music. Postwar Manchester was a pretty bleak landscape for young men trying to find their way; but it influenced them differently than London had, say, the Sex Pistols. Tony Wilson, the TV music host who “discovered” the band and then brought out their LPs on his new label,

Factory Records, explains their journey from punk to post-punk brilliantly: “Punk enabled you to say, ‘fuck you.’ But somehow it couldn’t go any further; it was a single, venomous, one-syllable/two-syllable phrase of anger. Which was necessary to reignite rock ’n’ roll. But sooner or later, someone was going to want to say more than ‘fuck you.’ Someone was going to want to say, ‘I’m fucked.’ And it was Joy Division who were the first band to do that, to use the energy and simplicity of punk to express more complex emotions.” “Fuck you” => “I’m fucked” (or “We’re fucked”): it’s the affective arc of punk to post-punk in four words.

Curtis’s vocals on the song sound different from the rest of the Joy Division catalog in two respects. The first is their drone-like quality; at moments in the song his vocal cords seem to be vibrating sympathetically to Hook’s bass and Bernard Sumner’s synth. Because he had to put aside his guitar for the ARP Omni when performing the song live, Sumner taught Curtis to play just one guitar chord, D major, throughout. It’s one secret of the song’s surprisingly dynamic energy: the drone of Curtis’s voice pitched against the melodic riffs coming from Sumner and Hook.

The other vocal guise that Curtis adopted on “Love Will Tear Us Apart” was suggested by the session’s engineer, Martin Hannett, who sent Curtis away one day with a Frank Sinatra album and told him to try to sing the song as a crooner might. We mostly hear it in the long, woozy loooove that starts each instance of the chorus, a line reading that wouldn’t be out of place in Sid Vicious’s preposterous cover of Sinatra’s “My Way.”

“Love Will Tear Us Apart” is a heartbreaking document of the death of a relationship that feels for all the world like the death of the self: a death that’s witnessed and coolly dissected from outside, but from which one can hardly break free. The (stereo-)typical language to describe such relationship strain is “drifting apart” or “growing apart,” and the song flirts with these half-truths: “we’re changing our ways / Taking different roads.” But the mood here isn’t disinterest, but “desperation” that “takes hold”: “Is it something so good / Just can’t function no more?” The truth is both starker and more hopeless: “Love, love will tear us apart.”

Ah: but that’s not the line. That’s the title; Deborah had the phrase “Love Will Tear Us Apart” inscribed on Ian’s tombstone, but a pedant might call that a misquotation. Because the line, repeated eight times in the song, ends with “again.” And that “again” wobbles a bit: Does it signify that we’ll each be alone again, as we were before love brought us together? Or does it suggest an even darker possibility: that love is now and forever tearing people apart? Even at twenty-three years old,

Curtis was capable of more mature insight into the ethical complexities of romantic relationships than the song’s title suggests. “Love Will Tear Us Apart” is the proof.

It’s this that Bernard Sumner has in mind when he calls “Love Will Tear Us Apart” “one of the most beautiful love songs ever written.” “It’s not a love song for the sake of it,” he writes in his memoir, “it’s no vacuous paean to pretend heartbreak or anything like that. It’s genuine, it’s real, and it swings back and forth between full-blown power and reflective introspection.” That’s no mean feat for a song that Hook says was written in three hours. But then the lyrics had surely been writing themselves on Curtis’s heart for far longer.

In a 2014 interview, Hook said that the song “has everything”: “A great bass line, wonderful synths, a great showcase of Steve [Morris]’s drumming, the simple yet effective guitar that became one of our trademarks.” What’s missing from this description? Curtis’s lyrics, of course, and the instrument with which he put them across. “It’s quite strange really,” Hook said, “because the lyrics are very dark but I find the song to be very uplifting—no other Joy Division song works like that. People go nuts for that song when we play it live, but it really is quite dark.” It’s the darkness of a lonely voice crying out, “I’m fucked”—or maybe, even more powerfully, “we’re fucked.”

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