For as ubiquitous as they are in pop culture, it’s almost a shock to remember that they only released two studio albums. Their trademark sound, marked by melodic basslines, robotic drums, stabbing guitars, and Ian Curtis’ distinct baritone drew up most of the post punk blue print, but they also had a huge impact on new wave, goth rock, and indie rock (as nebulous as that term is, it’s impossible to listen to bands like The National, Arcade Fire, Interpol, LCD Soundsystem, etc and not hear shades of Joy Division).

And while Substance is best celebrated for “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” their only Platinum single, this compilation serves as a career-spanning chronicle of one of the most important bands in pop music history.

If Substance does one thing, it demolishes my long-standing headcanon of how naive Joy Division was throughout their career. I’ve often described them as the best example of a band that didn’t know what they were doing and stumbled into genius. I believed they thought they were making an earnest Clash-sounding punk record when they went in to record Unknown Pleasures, but were thwarted by the experimental production of Martin Hannett.

Throughout the tracklist of Substance, which collects every non-album track in their career, it’s clear that Joy Division really was playing straightforward punk early on (the four-track EP An Ideal For Living is here in its entirety). And not only that, but their trademark sound appears mostly formed on tracks before Unknown Pleasures. The electric shock-rock punk of “Warsaw” or the ragged The Who-like protopunk of “No Love Lost” makes even the dance punk Factory Records sampler exclusives “Digital”  and “Glass” sound revolutionary. By the dour, six-minute gothic trudge of “Autosuggestion,” the band is practically in their final form (I swear “Autosuggestion” was rewritten as a song on Unknown Pleasures but I can’t find confirmation of that anywhere). The single “Transmission” bears almost no resemblance to Warsaw, the name the quartet took when they started as a punk band.

The other big myth that it dispels is that the surviving band members took an intentional shift away from the brooding, monochromatic post punk of Joy Division when they founded the technicolor new wave outfit New Order. And while Closer is certainly a dark album, the singles from that era show that Joy Division was on their way anyway. “Atmosphere” is practically triumphant, weightless synths buoying Curtis’s deep voice. The Closer outtake “Komakino” has the same asymmetrical raggedness of other songs from that album, but without the crushing weight of mortality.

And then, of course, there’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” on the 2015 remastered edition in two separate versions, which whirls through an almost disco drum beat and repeated bass melody with acoustic guitar and bright synth pads so cheerful that it completely distracts from the desperation of the lyrics.

While most compilations of this kind are more academic in nature, Substance somehow manages to be an enjoyable listen. Even the disparity between the more aggressive punk tracks and the poppier new wave singles play nicely off of one another, like extreme poles of a spectrum that Joy Division existed between. It’s a clearer picture of the band than can be given from the albums alone, which bathed the band in too stark and moody a light to see their subtlety. But this collection shows the full nuance of a complicated and wonderful band.