What is new wave music?

New wave is the name for the melodic, often commercial music that grew out of punk between 1976 and the mid 1980s. It kept punk’s short songs, its speed and its distrust of long solos, but it allowed things punk mostly refused: catchy choruses, keyboards, irony, dance rhythms and a clear ambition to get on the radio. When people say new wave today they usually mean the sound of Blondie, Talking Heads, Elvis Costello, The Cars, Devo or The B-52’s, and later the synthesizer bands that filled MTV’s first playlists.

The useful thing to know is that new wave was never a fixed style. It was a label, and the label moved. In 1976 it was almost the same thing as punk. By 1978 it meant everything that came out of the punk clubs but did not sound like the Sex Pistols. By 1982 an American teenager would have used it for anything British with a haircut and a synthesizer.

Where the term came from

Music writers borrowed “new wave” from the French film movement of the late 1950s, the nouvelle vague of Godard and Truffaut. By 1976 it was used loosely in New York for the bands at CBGB and Max’s Kansas City. In Britain the weekly papers used “punk” and “new wave” side by side through 1977, often in the same review.

The split came from two directions. Record companies preferred new wave because punk had become a word that got shows cancelled and singles banned after the Sex Pistols’ television appearance in December 1976. And the bands themselves were very different from each other. Talking Heads, with their art school background and their clipped funk, had little in common with The Damned. A second word helped to sort them.

What new wave sounds like

There is no single sound, but there are habits that run through most of the records:

1. Short, tight songs. Three minutes is normal, two and a half is common. Arrangements are lean and the chorus arrives early.
2. Nervous rhythm. Drummers favour straight, driving eighth notes and hi hats, often faster than seventies rock, sometimes borrowed from disco or reggae.
3. Keyboards as a lead voice. Cheap organs and early synthesizers, from the Farfisa sound of the sixties to the Prophet 5 and the Roland drum machines of the late seventies.
4. Clean guitars. Less distortion than punk, more choppy rhythm playing and short, angular figures.
5. Detached vocals. Ironic, cool or deliberately flat. Singers play characters instead of baring their souls.
6. A strong look. Thin ties, thrift shop dresses, bright colours and sharp graphics. The visual side mattered long before music video made it essential.

The first wave: New York and London, 1976 to 1979

In New York the new wave grew directly out of the punk scene around the Bowery. Blondie mixed girl group pop with punk tempo on their 1976 debut and turned the formula into hits with Parallel Lines in 1978. Heart of Glass, a disco track built around a drum machine, reached number one in Britain and the United States in 1979 and showed that a band from CBGB could own the charts. Talking Heads moved from the minimal Talking Heads: 77 to the layered African and funk influenced rhythms of Remain in Light in 1980.

In Britain the new wave label covered the songwriters who had come up through pub rock and the independent labels. Stiff Records, founded in 1976, released Elvis Costello’s My Aim Is True in 1977. The Police started as a punk band and found a style built on reggae rhythm and pop hooks. XTC, Squeeze, The Jam and The Pretenders all sold records under the same banner. Across the Atlantic, The Cars from Boston and Devo from Akron, Ohio, gave the American version its sound: crisp, mechanical and slightly sarcastic.

Synthesizers and the second wave, 1979 to 1984

The second half of the story is electronic. Gary Numan’s Tubeway Army topped the British charts in 1979 with a cold synthesizer single, and the next three years belonged to bands that had grown out of post-punk in Sheffield, Liverpool, Manchester and London. The Human League’s Dare in 1981 is the key record here: a former experimental band that turned itself into a pop group and sent Don’t You Want Me to number one at Christmas 1981.

Then came MTV. The channel started on 1 August 1981 with a small library of clips, and British acts had more of them than American ones. Duran Duran, A Flock of Seagulls, Culture Club, Eurythmics and The Human League filled the rotation, and between 1982 and 1984 they took over large parts of the American singles chart. For many listeners in the US this is what new wave means, which is why compilations of the genre range from the Ramones to Tears for Fears.

New wave outside Britain and America

Almost every Western pop market produced its own version. In West Germany it became the Neue Deutsche Welle, which started as an underground of independent labels in Hamburg, Düsseldorf and Berlin and ended as a chart phenomenon with Nena and Trio. In New York a harsher, anti commercial reaction against new wave appeared at the same time and named itself after its refusal: no wave.

Why the genre still matters

New wave is the moment when the punk idea of doing it yourself met the pop single. Independent labels, cheap synthesizers and home made sleeves sat next to major label campaigns and expensive videos. The music that came out of that collision is still in heavy use, from film soundtracks to the indie bands of the 2000s who copied its guitars and drum patterns.

Where to start

If you are new to the genre, take three records from three moments. Blondie’s Parallel Lines for the New York version, Elvis Costello’s This Year’s Model from 1978 for the British songwriter strand, and The Human League’s Dare for the synthesizer era. From there our list of the best new wave songs and our overview of new wave bands go wider. For the background, read how punk itself developed in our history of punk rock, and how the music papers named and sold these bands in the music press of the 1970s.