India, Aug. 23 -- In a flat in Manchester in January 1980, Ian Curtis (yes, that Ian Curtis, a few months from becoming post-punk's most mourned voice at 23) of the band Joy Division sat gluing coarse sandpaper onto record covers. What he and a few others were building was an audacious prank / experiment by the music label Factory Records: the sleeve for The Return of the Durutti Column, the debut album of the band of that name. The Durutti Column was, at the time, essentially one shy, depressed guitarist named Vini Reilly. The idea for the sandpaper came from label co-founder Tony Wilson, inspired by a prank / artistic statement from decades earlier: a 1959 book by French philosopher Guy Debord that was bound in sandpaper so it would scrape and ruin whatever books sat next to it on a shelf. Wilson wanted to now do the same with vinyl. Every copy of The Return of the Durutti Column was designed to destroy the records on either side of it. It was a joke, a dare, a piece of Dadaist theatre masquerading as packaging. Reilly had nothing to do with it, and was mortified when he found out. Here is the first thing worth pondering: that sleeve is one of the most talked-about objects to emerge from the post-punk era, and it is attached to an album that sounds absolutely nothing like the ploy implies. There is no confrontation. No noise. No sneer. Just Reilly's clean, fingerpicked, echo-drenched guitar, drifting and melodic, occasionally complemented by Martin Hannett's synthesisers and turned into something closer to chamber music than to punk's antagonism. That contradiction, it turns out, is the story of the band. Post-punk, as a genre, is largely a tale of voices with something to say. There is Joy Division's darkness, Gang of Four's Marxist sloganeering, The Fall's gnarly sneer. This is music built on lyrical seriousness and rhythmic aggression. Reilly opted out of the argument altogether. There is barely a lyric to be found across The Durutti Column's early records. Even his one obvious point of overlap with the scene - producer Martin Hannett, the man who gave Joy Division their addictive, cavernous sound on their debut album, Unknown Pleasures (1979) - worked in the opposite direction here, turning Reilly's playing spacious and bright rather than bleak. And then Reilly simply kept not settling. Across five decades, The Durutti Column absorbed jazz, flamenco, ambient textures and even, on 1996's Fidelity, sampling and dance beats. No hit ever arrived to tempt him to a formula. He just kept moving, unbothered by whether anyone was listening. The Durutti Column's audience has never been large, but it has been startlingly loyal. LC (1981) is the record long-time fans invoke the way other people revisit a favourite photograph: as a mood they can access on demand. Without Mercy (1984) pushed toward something almost classical. And when Wilson of the sandpaper idea died in 2007, Reilly's response was A Paean to Wilson (2010), a tribute so personal it seemed, for a long time, like a closing statement. Ill health slowed him down after that. For 15 years, this looked like where the story ended. Then, on July 31 this year, The Durutti Column released Renascent, their first collection of new material since A Paean... It is produced by long-time collaborator Keir Stewart, and still built around Reilly's guitar. If you've never heard The Durutti Column, this is, genuinely, as good a time as any to begin. Because, nearly 50 years on, the band remains something unusual in pop music's history, an outlier who never became a nostalgia act, a scene member who was never really part of the scene, and a cult that kept its faith without ever needing to race for the charts. Renascent isn't a comeback so much as a continuation of a story that had been quietly paused....