New wave music

• 1. Introduction

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  New wave music crept out of the mid-to-late 1970s with a strange and specific energy: twitchy rhythms, high-pitched vocals, choppy guitars, and a humorous refusal to take itself too seriously. It started life tangled up with punk rock, sharing its do-it-yourself spirit and its distaste for the "corporate" rock that dominated arenas and radio stations. But almost immediately, new wave began separating itself from punk's aggression. Where punk was raw and confrontational, new wave was lighter, more melodic, and more willing to reach toward pop. The question that haunted the genre from its first moments was this: what exactly was new wave? Depending on which country you were in, which decade, or which critic you asked, the answer changed completely. One American journalist eventually concluded the term had become "virtually meaningless." Yet for a stretch of years in the early 1980s, a genre that couldn't define itself somehow became one of the most commercially visible sounds in the world. How that happened is a story about fanzines, television, a deliberate marketing campaign, and the strange power of a label no one quite agreed on.

• 2. A Name Nobody Owned

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  As early as 1973, critics including Nick Kent and Dave Marsh were using the phrase "new wave" to describe New York proto-punk groups. The term meant something narrow then: a shorthand for a handful of acts orbiting the downtown scene. By the mid-1970s in the UK, it was appearing in punk fanzines like Sniffin' Glue and music weeklies such as Melody Maker and New Musical Express. In November 1976, writer Caroline Coon used it specifically to designate bands that were not quite punk but were adjacent to the punk-music scene. The phrase carried a deliberate cultural allusion: it nodded toward the French New Wave, the 1960s film movement defined by its experimental approach and its refusal of traditional forms.

  Seymour Stein of Sire Records shaped what the term would mean commercially. Believing that the word "punk" would mean poor sales for Sire's acts who had frequently played the New York club CBGB, Stein launched a "Don't Call It Punk" campaign in October 1977. The music industry had come to see punk as dangerous and violent after the emergence of bands like the Sex Pistols, making punk music, in Stein's view, "virtually unmarketable". A 1977 Phonogram Records compilation called New Wave gathered both American punk bands like the Dead Boys and the Ramones alongside Talking Heads and the Runaways, showing just how elastic the container was from the start.

  In England, the publication Sounds pursued a different vocabulary altogether. On the 26th of November 1977, journalists Jane Suck and Jon Savage published editorials in that magazine using the phrase "new musick" to describe bands moving past garage rock conventions and drawing from wider influences. The terms "post-punk" and "new wave" circulated interchangeably in British criticism for years. Paul Weller of the Jam cut through the taxonomy in a 1977 interview with Chas de Whalley: "It's just pop music and that's why I like it. It's all about hooks and guitar riffs. The new wave is today's pop music for today's kids, it's as simple as that."

• 3. The Sound and Its Roots

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  The Velvet Underground are among the most frequently cited influences on new wave, alongside the glam and art rock of Roxy Music and Sparks, and the solo work of David Bowie, Iggy Pop, and Brian Eno. Experimental rock artists including Captain Beefheart, Frank Zappa, and the Residents each contributed threads to the fabric. Germany's krautrock and electronic kosmische musik scene, and in particular Kraftwerk, shaped the genre's relationship to synthesizers. Visual aesthetics drew from avant-garde movements: Dada, Cubism, and the Bauhaus school all left marks on how new wave acts presented themselves.

  The genre's sonic personality was distinct. According to critic Simon Reynolds, new wave had a twitchy and agitated quality. Musicians played choppy rhythm guitars with angular riffs and fast tempos. Stop-start song structures, jerky rhythms, and prominent synthesizers were standard tools. Reynolds noted that new-wave vocalists tended to sound high-pitched, geeky, and suburban. Physically, a nervous or nerdy persona was common among both fans and artists. Acts like Talking Heads, Devo, and Elvis Costello made that persona central to their appeal. Robotic dancing and clothing that hid the body, including suits and large glasses, distinguished new wave audiences from the "hang loose" aesthetic of disco or the sexual bravado of what critics called "cock rock."

  The mid-1970s British pub rock scene fed some of the genre's most commercially successful practitioners, including Ian Dury and Nick Lowe, as well as Ireland's Boomtown Rats. In Ohio, Devo and Pere Ubu emerged from a local punk scene that ran parallel to New York's. Peter Ivers, who had started his career in the late 1960s, later hosted New Wave Theatre, a television program that showcased underground new wave acts and has been described by NTS Radio as bridging 1960s counterculture with new wave music, film, theater, and music television.

• 4. Breaking Through

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  In mid-1977, arena rock and disco dominated the American charts while punk and new wave acts received little or no radio airplay. Favorable lead stories in Time and Newsweek did not translate into commercial support. Small scenes developed in major cities, but the audience was mostly drawn from artistic and bohemian communities. In early 1979, Washington Post writer Eve Zibart noted the gap between critical enthusiasm and public indifference, observing that a stunning two-thirds of the Top 30 acts in the 1978 Pazz and Jop poll fell into the "New Wave-to-rock 'n' roll revivalist spectrum." A month later, Zibart identified Elvis Costello as the genre's best American prospect, but speculated that middle-class resistance to new wave's "working-class angst" would remain an obstacle.

  The commercial turn came in the final months of 1978. In October of that year, the Cars released "My Best Friend's Girl," which became one of the first new wave singles to enter the American Top 40, peaking at number 35 on the Billboard Hot 100 and reaching number three in the UK. In January 1979, Blondie released "Heart of Glass," which became the first new wave single to reach number one on both the US Billboard Hot 100 and the UK Singles Chart. That June, "My Sharona" by the Knack hit number one on the Billboard Hot 100. Its success, combined with new wave albums being much cheaper to produce during the music industry's worst slump in decades, prompted record companies to sign new wave groups at scale.

  Other hits followed in close succession: M's "Pop Muzik," Tubeway Army's "Are 'Friends' Electric?," the Police's "Roxanne" and "Message in a Bottle," Gary Numan's "Cars," and the Knack's "Good Girls Don't." CBGB owner Hilly Kristal, looking back at Television's first show at his club in March 1974, later said: "I think of that as the beginning of new wave."

• 5. MTV and the Second Invasion

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  In 1981, the launch of MTV shifted the genre's trajectory in America. British musicians had learned to make music videos early, partly because programs like Top of the Pops had made videos a staple of UK pop television since the mid-1970s. Steve Greenberg, head of S-Curve Records, later noted that British videos "were easy to come by since they'd been a staple of UK pop music TV programs." Most American hit records lacked videos at all, so MTV filled its hours with British new wave content by default.

  The result was the phenomenon journalists called the Second British Invasion. Several British acts on independent labels were able to outmarket and outsell American musicians on major labels. Urban contemporary radio stations were among the first to play dance-oriented new wave bands such as the B-52's, Culture Club, Duran Duran, and ABC. A December 1982 Gallup poll found that 14% of American teenagers rated new wave as their favorite type of music, placing it third among all genres. New wave was particularly popular on the West Coast, and the poll found that race was not a factor in the genre's appeal, which was unusual compared to other genres of the period.

  Director John Hughes became one of new wave's most effective advocates outside of music. Enthralled by British new wave, Hughes placed songs from acts including the Psychedelic Furs, Simple Minds, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, and Echo and the Bunnymen in films such as Sixteen Candles, Pretty in Pink, and The Breakfast Club. New wave soundtracks also appeared in the low-budget hit Valley Girl. Several of those songs became lasting standards of the decade. Non-new-wave artists made brief excursions into the style as well: Billy Joel recorded Glass Houses, Donna Summer released The Wanderer, Robert Palmer made Clues, Linda Ronstadt put out Mad Love, and Don Henley released both I Can't Stand Still and Building the Perfect Beast.

• 6. Cross-Cultural Currents

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  In the early 1980s, notable new wave acts in the United States embraced an intersection of pop and rock with African and African-American musical styles. Adam and the Ants and Bow Wow Wow, both acts connected to former Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren, used Burundi-style drumming. Talking Heads' album Remain in Light was marketed and positively reviewed as a breakthrough fusion of new wave and African styles, though drummer Chris Frantz later said he learned about the supposed African influence only after the fact.

  As the decade continued, new wave's influence spread into African-American music. Grace Jones, Janet Jackson, and Prince each drew on new wave elements. Prince in particular used those influences to build the groundwork for what became known as the Minneapolis sound. Regional scenes developed across Europe simultaneously: the Netherlands produced the ultra scene, Germany developed Neue Deutsche Welle, Spain generated La Movida Madrileña centered in Madrid, and Belgium and France contributed to coldwave. The Yugoslav new wave had its own distinct character.

  In the Soviet Union, an underground scene influenced by American and British punk subculture produced post-punk and new wave acts that gained prominence primarily in Moscow and Leningrad. Bands including Kino, Akvarium, Auktyon, Nautilus Pompilius, Piknik, and Alyans all emerged from this scene. Soviet new wave would later influence the Sovietwave movement that emerged during the 2000s and 2010s. In Spain, La Movida Madrileña arose in the aftermath of Francisco Franco's death, drawing on post-punk, synth-pop, and new wave, and continued to echo into the 2010s and 2020s through acts such as Depresión Sonora.

• 7. Decline, Revival, and Legacy

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  By the early 1980s, British and many American critics considered new wave over in the UK, overtaken by the new pop and New Romantic movements. In 2005, Guardian writer Andrew Collins named two candidate dates for new wave's "death": the breakup of the Jam, and the formation of Duran Duran. British rock critic Adam Sweeting described the Jam as "British New Wave at its most quintessential and successful" and noted that the band broke up just as British pop was being overrun by the "preposterous leisurewear and over-budgeted videos" of Culture Club, Duran Duran, and ABC. Music critic Bill Flanagan wrote in 1989 that new wave had progressively shed its punk roots, moving from Talking Heads to the Cars to Squeeze to Duran Duran to, "finally, Wham!"

  In the US, MTV kept playing "post-New Wave pop" acts with a British orientation until roughly 1986-87, when the channel shifted to a heavy metal and rock-dominated format. Some acts, particularly INXS, pivoted from new wave to a more straightforward rock sound. In the UK, many indie bands responded to the New Romantics by returning to the jangling guitar work that had marked earlier new wave. The arrival of the Smiths was characterized by the music press as a reaction against the opulence of new pop and a return to guitar-driven music. In September 1988, Billboard launched its Modern Rock chart, whose name itself reflected how new wave had been marketed as "modern."

  In the aftermath of grunge in the 1990s, the British music press promoted a "new wave of new wave" movement involving punk-influenced acts such as Elastica, though it was soon eclipsed by Britpop. In the 2000s, New York's electroclash and post-punk revival scenes produced acts sometimes labeled "New New Wave." Scottish band Franz Ferdinand was described by music journalist Chris Nickson as reviving both Britpop and the music of the late 1970s. In the mid-to-late 2010s, an internet meme gave rise to a microgenre first called "devo-core" and later renamed "egg punk," pioneered by Indiana band the Coneheads and built around the zany, lo-fi aspects of Devo. In 2021, a woman named Olivia V. coined the aesthetic term "indie sleaze" by launching the Instagram account @indiesleaze, tracing the visual style of the New York electroclash and bloghouse scenes back to new wave's roots.