“Love Vigilantes” by New Order

"Love Vigilantes" kicks off Low-Life, New Order's third album, from 1985, and it's a real curveball from the English band: a plain-spoken, decidedly poppy tune with a streak of American country and folk running through it, the sort of thing AllMusic likened to a campfire singalong. For a band this often filed under new wave, it's a surprisingly warm and homespun way to open a record.

All four members, Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook, Stephen Morris and Gillian Gilbert, share the writing credit, and the band produced it themselves, with Michael Johnson engineering. It came out on Factory, and it has held up well: The Guardian later ranked it ninth among the ten best New Order songs.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.