Joy Division has always been one of those bands that have hovered around in the background for me. At parties, at friends’ smoke-filled and stale beer-smelling basement suites, their signature synth-pop sound was always easy to identify. However, it wasn’t until a recent Sunday morning that I, in a very real way, heard them for the first time.

The CD that was in the player when this realization occurred was Substance. It is a compilation of Joy Division’s work in the short time they existed before front-man Ian Curtis’s tragic suicide and before the band and its surviving members were rechristened the more recognizable and more successful New Order – songs of which you can often hear and dance to in the most mainstream of nightclubs today. An easy sonic connection can be made between the two bands, but a dark energy, perhaps coming from Curtis’s tortured life, endows Joy Division’s music with a devastating raw power.

So, it was with surprise (or was it shock) when, expecting to hear atmospheric, pop-inflected music along the lines of Joy Division’s most recognizable track “Love Will Tear Us Apart” – to coincide with my melancholic mood – that I was inundated with a barrage of what I can only call punk rock.

Needless to say, I was completely knocked off my chair. Not so much because I was being exposed to something completely unexpected, but because what I was listening to completely blew me away – pretty good for a band that hasn’t existed for almost 30 years.

One of 17 tracks that cover Joy Division’s short career, “No Love Lost” is one of a handful of songs that capture a high energy UK punk influenced sound. The song begins with a throbbing bass and is soon joined by a buzzing guitar that sounds similar to early Pete Townshend. In fact, the first two minuets of “No Love Lost” is an instrumental that bears a remarkable resemblance to The Who of the mid-60s. But whereas contemporaries such as the Sex Pistols were loath to admit any affinity to so-called rock stars, in “No Love Lost” Joy Division seem to be content, or at least unaware, of the influences they are channeling.

As for the lyrics, they are a bizarre mixture of first person experience and third person narrative. Perhaps typical punk rock angst is being expressed when Curtis sings in mid-range, “Just to see you torn apart/ witness to your empty heart/ I need it/ I need it/ I need it.” But after the first verse, the song turns into a story of a woman who is the victim of some experiment or surgical procedure that is on display for the public.

It may be that the woman being experimented upon is the same one with the “empty heart” referred to in the first verse. Whether or not this is the case is unknowable, but the mixture of the two narrative points of view suggest a complexity, sophistication and darkness that will be developed to greater depth in Joy Division’s later, more recognizable music.

Check it out for the first time if you haven’t already.