It’s impossible to quantify the emotional landscape of a song—there’s no judgment more subjective—but to my ear, New Order’s “Ceremony” captures the drama of an unforgettable moment that feels like it’s going to change your life forever, one where everything that’s been is about to meet the future, and you can feel the unnamable tension of possibility swelling until it’s about to burst. The immortal opening bassline, played on the neck with a tension that sounds as if the strings might break, clangs like an alarm as if to say, Listen: this is important. It might be the most liminal pop song ever created, not just in its affective pull but also in the story of how it came together, written as one dream began to die and realized only when another was being born.

Though it would be New Order’s first single and would define the band’s sound, “Ceremony” began as a Joy Division song. By early 1980, the Manchester foursome—singer Ian Curtis, guitarist Bernard Sumner, bassist Peter Hook, drummer Stephen Morris—had been at it for almost four years and appeared from the outside to be poised for a breakthrough. Sumner and Hook attended a Sex Pistols gig in 1976 and, seemingly, like every British kid who saw the band that year, decided that the straight life was no longer an option. They needed to form a band. Early recordings after Curtis and Morris joined were promising but fairly conventional, but by the time of Joy Division’s debut, 1979’s Unknown Pleasures, produced by Martin Hannett and issued by Factory Records, they had a dark and ominous sound all their own.

As the members of Joy Division worked to finish the band’s second album, Closer, their days were already numbered. The final months of Curtis’ life in 1980 were filled with torment. His depression, possibly exacerbated by drugs he took for epilepsy, made it difficult for him to function. In April he was hospitalized after an overdose that he admitted was a suicide attempt. As he recovered, the other members of the band got together to work on new music, and they got a jump on two new songs. “We wrote them to cheer him up,” Bernard Sumner said. “We just carried on writing, I think the whole vibe was, ‘Let’s carry on as normal, don’t let him fall into this black hole again.’”

One of the two songs, “In a Lonely Place,” is a jet-black dirge that sounds like a hymn for a black mass, which possibly says something about what constituted “cheer” in Joy Division’s world. The other, at first untitled, was “Ceremony.” According to Hook, Morris was responsible for writing a significant part of the music, and perhaps this contribution explains the drummer’s fascination with the track. It “had hit single pressed though it like Blackpool rock,” Morris wrote in his book Record Play Pause: Confessions of a Post-Punk Percussionist, adding that it was “probably the only Joy Division song that I played repeatedly on cassette.”

Curtis wrote lyrics after his hospital stay, and on Joy Division’s demo of the song, it’s astonishing how well-formed it is, with virtually every element in place.

Hannett’s production was essential to what Joy Division had been and what New Order became, but here, all that was needed was a voice and three musicians in a room. Joy Division played it live once, at their final gig in Birmingham on May 2. A recording of this performance exists. It sounds remarkably close to the eventual New Order studio version, but through much of it, Curtis is either inaudible or captured in the distance by another microphone, almost as if he were already gone. Curtis praised the gig in his diary and mentioned “Ceremony” as its highlight.

On May 18, the day before Joy Division were to leave on their first trip to America, Curtis hanged himself. A non-album single, “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” came out in June, and Closer hit shops a month later. The other three members were, of course, devastated. And though there was no thought of the band continuing as Joy Division with another singer, there was a strong desire to continue playing together. Rehearsals were therapeutic. By summer the trio, which started using the name New Order, was playing shows and then started working on its first single.

The arrangement of “Ceremony,” as demonstrated by the versions that exist with Curtis, was in a state of utter perfection while Curtis was still alive. New Order had a lot of work to do figuring out how to make the song happen without him. First, they had to transcribe the lyrics. No one had written them down, and the band had to listen to the few tapes that existed and try to decipher his words. In an eerie coincidence, all surviving tapes of Curtis’ vocals are imperfect, filled with drop-outs and off-mic passages, as if he were a ghost dissolving into the ether. It’s hard to attribute a specific meaning to the words they landed on. “When you listen to those lyrics, it strikes you that they’re quite possibly saying, ‘I’ll show everyone, I’m going to do it this time,’” Sumner later said. Little phrases pop out: “different story,” “strength to hold me,” “it’s got to be this time.” But you tend to arrange them around whatever’s happening when the song plays.

And then there was the matter of who would sing it. According to Hook, Stephen sang the verses live while Sumner handled the chorus, and even as they headed into the studio, New Order were unsure who would be the band’s frontman. They figured it out while recording “Ceremony,” trying the song with Hook, Morris, Sumner, and all three together, until Sumner alone nailed a take.

In the fall of 1980, New Order went to New York to play gigs and record with Hannett while finishing “Ceremony.” (In a confusing turn, a second version, quite similar to the first, was recorded back home after keyboardist Gillian Gilbert joined the band. Both were issued as singles and have been included on various anthologies.)

It’s often been said that Joy Division sounded like Manchester, evoking the grey skies and crumbling buildings that had been destroyed during WWII. On “Ceremony,” New Order sounds like a version of New York that would take hold in the 1980s. Though the instrumentation was guitar, bass, and drums, Hook’s repeated line has the pulse and tonality of sequenced electronics and Morris’ drumming is highly danceable. Soon enough, New Order would be adding synthesizers and a drum machine and the template established by “Ceremony” made these developments seem inevitable. The fabled downtown scene with its mix of post-punk, disco, and early hip-hop was underway—Hannett recorded ESG in New York in 1980—and New Order’s music was a perfect fit.

That was the future, one that New Order’s first single would help usher in. And it came from a past steeped in tragedy, where the trio took something broken and pieced it back together so they could share it with the world. OK. Then there’s where “Ceremony” lives. For me, it exists forever in the present, animating the time and place in which I find it and making it seem like the most important moment of my life. Which, since the present is all we ever have, it is.