The beautiful thing about this song is that you don't have to know the backstory, you don't have to know about Joy Division or New Order or the painful transition, to immediately grasp how brilliant it is, just as a sonic phenomenon:

Define "postpunk" in seven songs? Okay, here goes:

1.) "Ceremony" - New Order
2.) "A Promise" - Echo & The Bunnymen
3.) "The 15th" - Wire
4.) "Definitive Gaze" - Magazine
5.) "New Face In Hell" - The Fall
6.) "All Cats Are Grey" - The Cure
7.) "Poptones" - Public Image Ltd.

Postpunk really is an exclusively British phenomenon. Only US band of that era that really felt like it matched the sound of the UK movement was Mission Of Burma. And tbf this ranks up there with the all-time greats: https://twitter.com/maxdunat/status/1289014907397197824

Mission Of Burma...man, what could have been. "Academy Fight Song" and "That's When I Reach For My Revolver" are songs that no human being who claims to like popular music should be ignorant of.

"Postpunk" matters enough to me as a musical genre that it's actually included in my profile description. What is the sound? Well, in my mind at least, this is one song that epitomizes what 'postpunk' is and in fact probably helped invent it. Ice cool:

But then again you have this, from Howard Devoto and Magazine in 1978. Devoto quit The Buzzcocks right before they made it big because, amusingly enough, he thought Pete Shelley was 'selling out'. But then he put this as the title track of his first LP:

btw don't sleep on Magazine as a band. This is, again to name another foundational postpunk song, one of the most propulsive recordings of its era. When it finally hits is climax it becomes the sonic version of that GALAXY BRAIN meme:

It takes a band that truly, truly does not give a shit about making a hit single to keep delaying, and delaying, and delaying the big payoff to one of its best songs until 2m50s through a 4m40 long song.

I've avoided this until now because I've mentioned it far too many times on Twitter anyway, but if postpunk had to be distilled down to One Single Song and held up for divine judgment, it's this song, from maybe the most underrated band I can think of:

Said it before, but hey: there's a reason HEAVEN UP HERE will forever be my background profile art. My favorite album cover of all time. Subjective, yes, but c'mon you know I'm right.