Joy Division
Closer

It is 1980.
Punk is dying and with it the little good music that, with enormous effort, Bowie and the likes try to drag along; the world of rock (with England at the forefront) begins to miss bands like Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath, burying the Sex Pistols and the Clash, when suddenly, in less than a year, an album is about to change the course of contemporary music forever (unintentionally!!!).
The album is titled Closer, and the creators are the Joy Division, four guys from Macclesfield, an industrial "paradise" near Manchester.
Leading them is an Ian Curtis at a breaking point, more terrified and introspective than ever, moreover aware that the end of what had been his personal ordeal until then was definitively approaching, after years of catacombal darkness.

Because this is Closer.
An album with a chilling breath, capable of "warming" the listener only on a few claustrophobic occasions.
The beginning exemplifies this: "Atrocity Exhibition" sounds like a welcome of ominous awareness culminating in the subsequent "Isolation", a highly paranoid ballad shaken by an equally obsessive bass.
With "Passover" the atmospheres calm down until they freeze the blood in the veins, just in time to recover and face "Colony", a march of exasperating feedback and reverberations;
"A Means To An End" manages to be more listenable and melancholic, still not up to the subsequent "Heart And Soul", where Curtis' soul materializes in the form of a gentle and delicate prayer, sung like a poem;
"Twenty Four Hours" opens up space for melodies (almost imperceptible until this moment) only to plunge again into the majestic and decadent "The Eternal", a spiritual isthmus that finally leads to "Decades", where any unlikely hope is mercilessly erased.

After this Masterpiece, Curtis took his own life just before embarking on the much-anticipated tour in the States with the band.

The glacial beauty of the album is indisputable due to the ruthless sincerity it suggests, and certainly worth much more than the trivial refrains that from the '80s onward filled the monochrome days of the yuppies of the era...