The room › Artists › Joy Division

Where to start with Joy Division

Start with Atrocity Exhibition - 2007 Remaster — Closer, 1980. That is the track sitting closest to the centre of all 23 Joy Division tracks in Zubissou Sounds — a listening room of 15,847 tracks placed one at a time by hand, not an algorithm.

This page is not a discography and not a ranking. It describes exactly one thing: the 23 Joy Division tracks that one person put in one room, and where they sit relative to each other. The starting point above is chosen by a rule you can check — of the 23 tracks, it is the one nearest the average position on the four knobs the room runs on, and where two sit equally close the one on a named record wins. Nothing here calls any record better than any other.

The collection leans hard on one record: 21 of the 23 tracks come from Closer alone.

The years need a caveat: 22 of 23 dated tracks land in the 1980s and come from 2 records, while the rest come from elsewhere — the mark of a reissue carrying its own date rather than the music's. Read the year column below as the date on the copy in this room, not the date the music arrived in the world.

The mood knob swings 48 points across these tracks, the widest of the four — it is the axis this artist actually travels along in this room.

Three ways in

The one track, if you only play one

Atrocity Exhibition - 2007 Remaster — Closer, 1980. Of the 23 Joy Division tracks here, this one sits closest to the average of all of them across the four knobs the room runs on. It is the least surprising thing in the collection, which is exactly what an entry point should be.

If you want the melancholy end

24 Hours — The Complete BBC Recordings, 2000. The lowest mood reading of any Joy Division track in the room (18 out of 100). This is as far towards melancholy as the collection goes.

If you want the euphoric end

The Sound of Music - 2007 Remaster — Still (Collector's Edition), 1981. The highest mood reading here, at 66 out of 100 — a 48-point swing across the collection towards euphoric.

Where Joy Division sits in the room

Zubissou Sounds does not have playlists or genres you click. It has knobs. Every track carries a position on each one, set by hand when the track was added, and you find music by setting the room to a state rather than by searching for a name. These are Joy Division's average coordinates and the range they cover.

All four run 0–100. They are placed by a person, not derived from audio analysis or from any streaming service's feature data.

What is here, record by record

Every Joy Division track in the room

Near neighbours in this room

These are the artists whose average knob position sits nearest to Joy Division's in this room. It is a coordinate match, not a claim that they sound alike.

• Where to start with Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds — post-punk, 41 tracks
• Where to start with The Wake — post-punk, 23 tracks
• Where to start with Radiohead — art rock, 99 tracks

What the open databases say

MusicBrainz lists Joy Division as a group, from Salford, the United Kingdom and formed in 1978. Its contributors tag the artist post-punk, new wave and gothic rock. These are the open database's facts, not mine — you can check them against the MusicBrainz entry.

Questions

How many Joy Division tracks are in Zubissou Sounds?

There are 23, across 3 albums. 23 of them carry a date, running from 1980 to 2000. That is the whole of what this room holds — it is one person's collection, not a discography.

Is this a best-of, or a ranking?

No. Nothing here is ranked and no track is called better than another. The starting point is picked by arithmetic — the track closest to the centre of all the others on four measured axes — and the rule is printed above so you can disagree with it.

Where do the knob numbers come from?

They are set by hand, one track at a time, by the person who added the track. They are not audio analysis and not a Spotify feature. Mood, energy, density and the head/body balance each run 0 to 100. All 23 of these tracks have been read individually — nothing on this page is running on a default.

Can I listen to these here?

Not yet from this page. Zubissou Sounds is in private beta — the room itself plays through Spotify, and 23 of these 23 tracks are matched to a Spotify ID and ready to play the moment you are in. The waitlist form is at the bottom of this page.