My appreciation for Joy Division’s ‘Twenty Four Hours’ really set in during my blank year of 2019 when I was unemployed, looking for jobs and sort of wallowing in my own misery. I think I’ve referenced this time of my life before. And whenever I wasn’t applying for vacancies and sending receipts of these applications to my sister at her request so she could judge how I was doing, I was listening to albums. My old ASUS laptop, which I used throughout uni, was at the time running low on storage because of all the music I had downloaded onto it. So I created my own task of listening through the albums I had in my iTunes library and deleting the songs I felt I wasn’t returning to all that much. Joy Division’s Closer had been in there for some time. Wish I could tell you exactly when, but that laptop is on the fritz as I also may have said before. It’s at least after 2013. But in 2019, it was the first time I’d properly gone through it in years. It’s not the kind of album I think of turning to when I spontaneously decide to listen through one. But I did, on whatever day it was, and got to thinking, “Hmm… ‘Twenty Four Hours’. I like that one,” once that song was done.

Why isn’t Closer the sort of album to go to for a casual listen? Well, for anyone not in the know, the LP was the last of Joy Division’s to be worked on before lyricist and singer Ian Curtis died by suicide. Officially the band’s final statement, or at the very least Curtis’s, and the songs within are nine different windows providing a view of how much he was suffering internally at the time. Or I won’t sensationalize it and instead say it’s from the POV of narrators who are clearly going through a trying ordeal. ‘Twenty Four Hours’, in my view, is from the perspective of “someone” who senses they are running out of time in this world. The hope they once had is now gone, only darkness looms. A search for salvation is the main objective. If it’s not found, there’s a big chance the narrator won’t be around for much longer. And I like to think the song’s title is the amount of time they’ve given themselves before their final decision. The urgency of the situation is apparent, symbolised by the sections with the rushing guitar and pounding snare drum, echoing with each strike. The drum fills during those parts never quite fall precistly on the downbeat too. Near claustrophobic, quite anxiety-inducing.

And ’cause there’s no chorus to sort of connect everything together, the track relies on the dynamic set between the quieter, rolling sections, led by Peter Hook’s melodic bass guitar, and the aforementioned propulsive sections. They say the quiet/loud contrast was firmly established by Pixies, but Joy Division seemed to be doing it just over a decade before. I’ve got to say, a lot of times, I find myself humming along to Hook’s bass line all the way throughout, missing Curtis’s words altogether. To be fair, it is a very memorable bass line. That’s nothing new when it comes to the bass lines in Joy Division songs. It’s also the very first thing in the song you hear. When it does come to Curtis’s lyrics, though, all I can say is they make up five verses based on sheer resigned acceptance. “Just for one moment, thought I’d found my way / Destiny unfolded, I watched it slip away.” That’s just half of one. Hard not to associate anything that’s depicted in the song with what would tragically follow in reality. Feels a bit trite to just say rest in peace. Even though that’s the thing you do say when someone’s died / been dead for a while, I didn’t know Ian Curtis at all. As if that had to be said. It would have been nice if he got the help he needed.