“Regret” by New Order

"Regret" was the song that led New Order into Republic, their sixth album, when London Records released it in the spring of 1993, and it came with a new home: with Factory Records collapsed, it was the band's first single on CentreDate Co Ltd, through London. Stephen Hague produced it with the band and Pascal Gabriel, mixed it with Mike "Spike" Drake, and even took a co-writing credit alongside Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook, Stephen Morris and Gillian Gilbert.

What they made is New Order at their most wistful and wide open, a bright, guitar-heavy pop rock song with the old dance pulse still ticking underneath, bittersweet in exactly the way the title promises. It's an alternative dance record that hardly needs the dancefloor.

It was a hit on both sides of the Atlantic, reaching the top 10 in the UK, Ireland, Canada and Portugal and climbing to 28 on the Billboard Hot 100, the highest New Order ever got on that chart, while topping two other Billboard charts. Peter Care shot the video in Rome, and the bill ran past £200,000.

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