Substance is New Order’s best album.

This sentiment is risky for at least two reasons: first, I’ve yet to hear the rest of New Order’s albums beyond Substance. Second, Substance isn’t really even an “album”; it’s a compilation of the band’s singles along with their accompanying B-sides. Several of these singles have appeared on previous albums.

And yet in spite of all that, I just can’t see myself ever liking a New Order album better than I do Substance. It’s great: Exile on Main St. great; White Album great (it’s even got the white cover); insert-your-favorite-sprawling-double-LP great. These huge, multifaceted statement releases tend to suck up the critical air on some bands in a way I usually don’t connect to (The Beatles is barely in the top-five Fab Four albums), but as it stands right now, I can’t imagine a better version of New Order than the one we hear here. Substance is a titanic, colorful, diverse, powerful, utterly hypnotizing release that collects the absolute best of what New Order’s sound had grown into during the 1980s and turns that into pure cream. Beautiful.

And to be fair, it’s not like the songs were ever quite like they are here on their previous appearances on the albums proper. Substance is, by far, New Order’s danciest collection to date, with the singles cuts of “Perfect Kiss,” “Bizarre Love Triangle,” and a whole host of others stretching and remixing the album sounds into groovy, hypnotic 6-,7-, and even 8-minute beatscapes that somehow manage never to lose the melodic core that made those songs work in the album context. New Order’s quest to make accessible dance music that still has the punch of rock has never succeeded with flyinger colors than here.

It’s also with Substance that the full extent of New Order’s legacy on the early-2000s “dance-punk” wave and on LCD Soundsystem in particular becomes apparent: the similarities in sound and structure between this collection and LCD Soundsystem’s self-titled debut are remarkable, right down to (if we’re going by the CD release of Substance, which we should [it’s great]) the split between the rock-oriented first disc and the weirder, spacier, most instrumentally focused second disc. New Order is a lot more emotionally open than James Murphy’s music was at the time of his debut, and they’ve got nothing as cheeky as “Losing My Edge.” But the connections between the two are so close that if you’d told me that LCD Soundsystem came out a year or two after Substance (instead of a decade and a half later in dance music evolution), I’d need no convincing. Revivalism indeed.

Which is all to say that Substance is just fantastic, phenomenal, legendary stuff. I’ve yet to buy any of the albums I’ve heard in my run through Joy Division/New Order (yay streaming–yes, I’m part of the problem), but once I do buckle down to own these things, I know which one I’m sprinting toward first.