My Top 1000 Songs #771: No Love Lost

[I've been writing up my Top 1000 songs on a daily basis--you can see them all in descending order by hitting the All My Favorite Songs tag.]

Joy Division's one-two punch of 1979's Unknown Pleasures and 1980's Closer is such a remarkable (and sadly truncated) collection of distinctive, emotionally gripping music, that it's kinda crazy that barely a year earlier they had gotten their start as raw punk-rockers. Though even their earliest songs were no mere retreads of the Pistols music that had inspired them to form, the pre-goth darkness setting in right off the bat.

When I discovered those albums (and the posthumous Still collection) in college, their earliest singles and EPs (some first released under the band's original name, Warsaw) were all but impossible to find. I think I first heard "No Love Lost" on an iffy bootleg, and would have to wait a few years for that track (and the rest of 1978's 4-song EP An Ideal For Living) to show up on the marvelous Substance collection. But it was a song that captured my imagination right off the bat. It's a rougly-recorded but rousing rocker, rooted in punk, with a killer guitar hook, a distinctive extended drum & bass opening, plus that amazing drum break in the bridge. But the creepy spoken-word interlude (excerpted from a disturbing book which, alongside the cover art, played up the band's unfortunate and questionable fixation on Holocaust imagery) feels like a precursor to the darkness the band would usher in soon thereafter.

Alternate version:

LCD Soundsystem cover, 2022 (hey, our second LCD Soundsystem cover in just a few days!):

Cool live cover by The Distillers:

Another cover, by The Effigies:

Smashing Pumpkins joined by Joy Division/New Order's Peter Hook: