Substance (Joy Division album)
1988 compilation album by Joy Division
Substance is a singles compilation album by the English rock band Joy Division. It was released on 11 July 1988 by Factory Records. It is the companion to a similar singles compilation by their subsequent band New Order, also titled Substance. It peaked at number 7 on the UK Albums Chart and 146 on the Billboard 200, the band's only chart appearance in the United States. It also reached number 15 in New Zealand and number 53 in Australia in August 1988.
Content
Substance compiles the four singles released by the band that did not appear on albums — "Transmission", "Komakino", "Love Will Tear Us Apart", and "Atmosphere" — as well as most of their B-sides. It also collects tracks released on various EPs, namely the band's first release, An Ideal for Living, and two samplers issued by Factory Records, A Factory Sample and Earcom 2: Contradiction.
Two of the album's tracks, "Glass" and "Dead Souls", were previously included on the 1981 compilation Still. Additionally, the single "Atmosphere" had been originally issued in France as "Licht und Blindheit" with "Dead Souls" on the B-side; following Ian Curtis's suicide, it was reissued as a posthumous B-side of the "She's Lost Control" 12-inch single. The vinyl version omits the single "Komakino" and does not include the complete titles from the EPs, due to the lower storage capacity of a vinyl record.
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Attribution, date and provenance are strongest when supported by the original work, a catalogue record and documented transmission. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 7, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1930192. The first chronological checks are 1988 and 1981.
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This entry incorporates text from “Substance (Joy Division album)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.