‘A Means to an End’: Joy Division anthem that defied the notion they were ‘nihilistic’

Posted On April 14, 2025April 14, 2025

While Manchester post-punks Joy Division‘s legacy is shrouded in popular lore and mordant romanticism, their final album is indeed impossible to experience without the troubled frontman’s suicide two months prior hovering over its funereal majesty. Dropped in July 1980, Closer takes a giant leap into Unknown Pleasures‘ sonic expanses but retreats from its austere minalism for a richer pallete of synths and instrumentation illustrating Ian Curtis’ oblique lyrical existentialism.

Death and mortal anguish haunt Closer to such a degree it’s impossible to envisage how Joy Division would have followed up such a parting statement. From the album’s contemplative cover of the Appiani family tomb in Italy’s Monumental Cemetery of Staglieno to the closing synth-soaked eulogies that chill the LP’s ruminative finale, a sense of eulogy is inescapable throughout.

“While we were working on Closer, Ian said to me that doing this album felt very strange, because he felt that all his words were writing themselves,” guitarist Bernard Sumner revealed to The Independent in 2007. “He also said that he had this terrible claustrophobic feeling that he was in a whirlpool and being pulled down, drowning”.

Something deep and dark was reflected in Curtis’ lyrics and the gothic mood of the record, yet in his creative search for meaning, an answer could on occasion come into focus from a distance, tease with a flash of clarity before darting back into his nihilistic lyrical void.

Written during the latter part of 1979, the guitar-heavy ‘A Means to an End’ had already seen the light of day on their live sets, but still packed a punch in contrast to Closer‘s weathered arrangements. Hitting with Killing Joke heft, Peter Hook’s bass is the most aggressive he’s ever wielded for Joy Division, spiked with extra propulsive stride via Stephen Morris’ martial drumming. Fronting the hacking groove is Curtis’ baritone croon, never breaking a sweat and maintaining his steely command throughout.

While always obscured in Curtis’ lyrical ambiguity, a gut sense that he’s reaching for humanity at its most noble evokes an arcane image of universal valour and Man’s eternal wade through the darkness to reach what is just and right: “We fought for good, stood side by side / Our friendship never died / On stranger waves, the lows and highs / Our vision touched the sky / Immortalists with points to prove / I put my trust in you”.

Society’s better self was certainly grabbed at in his final months, albeit in futility. While well known for dour fascinations with Nazism and fascism—a perception of flirting with SS themes that would dog them for years—largely wrought from the alienated milieu of late 1970s Macclesfield over sincere affection for the Right, cultural nihilism on such a facile level never seeped into Joy Division’s enduring work.

Inhabiting a stunning sonic and thematic plane untainted by trends, irony, or contrived calculations—Closer‘s ‘A Means to an End’ documents expertly the path toward sincerity far removed from the tags of bleak meaningless they’ve been tacked with ever since Curtis’ passing.

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