Let's Dance

New Order
Movement
Power, Corruption & Lies
Low-Life
Brotherhood
Technique

New Order’s whole career is right there in their 1982 12-inch single “Temptation”: disco drums, jittery guitars, synth goop, all building into nine minutes of new-wave tremble and shiver. When these gawky English kids launch into the chorus (“Up, down, turn around/Please don’t let me hit the ground”), they sound like they’re dancing for the first time in their lives, positive it will end in heartbreak, but brave enough to stick around till dawn just to see what happens. It’s a weirdly inspirational sound, and it sums up everything they had to say.

Nobody expected much from the surviving members of Joy Division. When Ian Curtis flamed out in 1980, committing suicide on the eve of the post-punk heroes’ first U.S. tour, all he left them was alone. Yet they stuck together, renamed themselves New Order, learned to write songs and accidentally stumbled onto a career as one of the all-time great English pop groups. None of them could sing, so guitarist Bernard Sumner got stuck with the job, and drummer Stephen Morris brought in his girlfriend Gillian Gilbert to play keyboards. Much to their surprise, the electro-goth dance experiments became influential club hits around the world, opening up emotional and musical realms Curtis never could have imagined. Even when Sumner’s vocals were laughable—which was almost always—his boyish mumble had the anonymous this-could-be-you realness of the finest disco and punk.

New Order were haphazard about assembling albums—in 1983 they released two classic dance hits, “Blue Monday” and “Confusion,” yet failed to put either on their next record. So these superb new deluxe editions are not only definitive, they’re essential ’80s testaments, adding the singles and B-sides that should have been included all along. The band’s gloomy debut, Movement, finally sounds complete now that it has the second disc, collecting the brilliant singles the band knocked out in 1981 and 1982: “Everything’s Gone Green,” “Ceremony,” “Mesh” and especially “Temptation."  Power, Corruption & Lies was glossier and more grandiose, coasting on the synth-pop epics “Age of Consent” and “Your Silent Face.” These records served notice that New Order were more than Joy Division II—they were getting into a totally different groove, figuring out how sequencers and drum machines worked with a “what does this button do?” spirit.

They were also figuring out how human hearts worked, including their own, which is why their next two albums were their best. Low-Life goes for vividly romantic club sounds, with a surprisingly playful sense of humor—check out the wacko harmonica solo that opens “Love Vigilantes” or the high-NRG goof “Face Up,” which might have the doofiest lyrics of Sumner’s career (“I feel so low, I feel so humble/Sometimes in life we take a tumble”—egads!). The eyeliner-melting melodies and elastic Peter Hook basslines reach a climax in “The Perfect Kiss,” an ode to late-night dance-floor desperation; Sumner speaks for generations of drunk, lonely club kids when he sighs, “Tonight I should have stayed at home/Playing with my pleasure zone.” Brotherhood is another step forward, with the band’s warmest tunes and zippiest beats. Sumner sounds dazed but passionate, riding the  open-hearted surge of “Weirdo,” “Broken Promise” and New Order’s most famous hit, the eternal floor-filler “Bizarre Love Triangle.” (That’s the one that goes, “Every time I see you falling/I get down on my knees and pray …”) And for giggles, there’s the hilariously dreadful B-side “1963,” whose emotional impact is roughly akin to Morrissey starring in Flashdance.

They bid a graceful farewell with 1989’s Technique, paying tribute to the Ibiza acid-house club scene they’d made possible. The album has freaky beats (“Fine Time”), sad ballads (“All the Way”) and, apparently, wheelbarrows full of drugs. New Order retired into the usual cycle of break-ups, reunions, dodgy side projects and a flukily fantastic 1993 comeback hit (“Regret”), but these albums remain the band’s legacy, especially in these editions. Together, they tell a quintessential pop story—how four antisocial twits from Manchester learned, almost against their will, to have fun in public.

DOWNLOAD: “Temptation,” “Hurt,” “Weirdo”