Professional ratings
Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic
The A.V. Club	B+
Blender
Los Angeles Times
NME	9/10
Pitchfork Media	9.2/10
Q
Rolling Stone
The Rolling Stone Album Guide
The Village Voice	B+

Technique is the fifth studio album by the English rock band New Order, released in 1989 via Factory Records. Partly recorded on the island of Ibiza, it incorporates Balearic beat and acid house influences into the group's dance/rock sound.

Technique was the first New Order album to reach number one in the UK charts. "Fine Time", the first single lifted from it, reached number 11. Remixed versions of "Round & Round" and "Run" were also released as singles. John Denver's publishing company filed a lawsuit, alleging that the guitar break in "Run" too closely resembled Denver's "Leaving on a Jet Plane". The case was settled out of court. An instrumental version of "Vanishing Point" was used on the BBC series Making Out.

Music videos were produced for the three singles.

In 2008 the album was re-released in a Collector's Edition with a bonus disc.

Ian Harrison wrote in the liner notes of the 2008 Collector's Edition: "It's arguable that Technique is more a clear split between rock and electronic dance than Brotherhood was [...] While 'Fine Time', 'Round and Round', 'Mr Disco', 'Vanishing Point' and 'Dream Attack' sit in the latter category, [...] the vocal songs ['All the Way', 'Love Less', 'Guilty Partner' and 'Run'] with guitars are infused with a similar sensuality." Bernard Sumner reflected, "We were in this position of being known for this dance-electronic sound and it would have been daft to have just stopped doing it. That was the nature of the time. The way I saw it was we were still writing band music as well, so we'd reached a compromise." Peter Hook joked that the album was "an epic power struggle between the sequencers and me. I was resisting it valiantly, because I still wanted us to be a rock band."

Sumner also wrote all of the lyrics himself, and Harrison suggested that the band recording on the island of Ibiza heavily influenced the sound and lyrics of the album, as while there the band became fascinated by Balearic club music. Gillian Gilbert recalled, "We had Mike (Johnson, engineer) with us, so there was always somebody doing something, but it was the beginning of us not being together in the studio when we were doing things. It was like, 'oh you do your drums today, and I'll do the vocals tonight...' The songs were sort of there but there were huge chunks missing. You'd leave blocks and say, 'will you fill that in? I'm off now.'" The band had chosen to record in Ibiza at Hook's urging after a series of records made in "dark and horrible" London studios. Morris described the sound of the Balearic beat clubs on the island they began to visit as "mad! They'd put an acid record on and then the next one would be a Queen one—it was schizophrenic, really. It’d be something really Spanish and then something really daft. It was a really odd mix but it all seemed to make sense when you were there. I don’t why that was. Maybe because we were all a bit out of our brains."

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