While a vague and nebulous term, the new wave was a very real thing. Born from punk’s lightning bolt three years previous, a new generation of artists, rhetorically at least, owed nothing to the hippy idyll that had curdled into prog or classic rock at its most bloatedly excessive. 1979 was the year new wave and the broader post-punk truly shone, pushing punk’s example into new terrain, and chopping down any peripheries that had been tediously put in place by the mohawked and tartan-slacked puritans seemingly set on snuffing the life out of punk’s glorious, insurrectionary yonder.
While not quite as seismic a leap forward as the previous decade’s dizzying cultural shift, the 1970s too found itself inhabiting a very different world than the one it arrived in. Technology was forging new aural flavours, ever-portable instruments and gear were rendering the daunting world of music that bit easier to chew, and an explosion of indie labels was at hand to take a risky punt on a new band’s off-kilter single or EP. Such conditions bloomed across 1979, overseeing a level of experimentation that rivalled anything from the swinging London era’s psych-garage fancies.
A brief perusal across 1979’s album drops reveals an astonishing year for both the mainstream and the underground, a 12 months of artistic essentiality that towers over the decade’s first year. Amid such a trove of dynamic works, we try our very best to glean a handful of numbers that marked the most prescient impact on music’s chart peaks and hidden subterranean.