New Order – Power, Corruption & Lies (vinyl album)

“Power, Corruption & Lies,” released by New Order in 1983, is the record where the band fully stepped out of Joy Division’s shadow and into their own hybrid of post-punk, electronics, and dance-driven experimentation. Building on “Movement,” but far more confident and colourful, the album draws together synth-pop, new wave, and early club influences, with tracks like “Age of Consent,” “5-8-6,” and “Your Silent Face” signalling a new era in the band’s sound. Recorded in the same period as “Blue Monday,” it captures New Order at the moment they reimagined what rock and electronic music could be.

Just as pivotal as the music is Peter Saville’s iconic cover design, one of his most celebrated works for Factory Records. Saville selected a reproduction of Henri Fantin-Latour’s “A Basket of Roses”, an overly romantic 19th-century still life that deliberately clashes with the album’s modernist typography. Rather than placing the band’s name and title on the front, Saville devised a modular colour-code system — a graphic cipher running along the sleeve — that encodes “New Order” and “Power, Corruption & Lies.” The key to the code appears on the back cover and later resurfaced on the sleeves for “Blue Monday,” “Confusion,” and Section 25’s “From the Hip.”

The choice of the Fantin-Latour painting was almost accidental: Saville originally sought a Renaissance portrait that reflected the album’s Machiavellian title, but changed direction after seeing the postcard at the National Gallery. The flowers, he noted, suggested how power and deception often arrive in seductive forms. The gallery initially refused Factory access to the image, until Tony Wilson famously argued that the artwork belonged to “the people of Britain,” at which point permission was granted. The sleeve has since become a cultural artefact in its own right, appearing on a Royal Mail “Classic Album Covers” stamp in 2010 and entering the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art.

Critically acclaimed on release and consistently celebrated since, “Power, Corruption & Lies” is widely regarded as one of the defining albums of the 1980s. It captures New Order discovering a new language — a fusion of sequencers, rhythm machines, sharp-edged songwriting, and emotional restraint — while Saville’s design reframes the music through one of the most inventive visual identities of the decade.