No wave
Shouted. Barked or chanted, and you can still make out the words.
In short
A total refusal of melody and standard tuning. Short-lived, extreme and hugely influential on noise rock.
How it sounds
- Random or modified tunings, with the guitar used as a percussion object.
- A refusal of melody, tonal harmony and repeatable structure.
- Screamed or spoken vocals, dissonant saxophone, primitive drumming.
Hear what that means
- Refusing to play conventionally from 2:09
Teenage Jesus and the Jerks - Pre
Slide and hammered single notes in no key, over a mechanical bass. Lydia Lunch's delivery is closer to theatre than to singing.
Open on YouTube at 2:09 - Rhythm from free jazz from 2:19
Tribal, unswinging drumming borrowed from outside rock entirely - the element of no wave that most obviously survived into what came next.
Open on YouTube at 2:19 - Volume as confrontation
Slow, punishing repetition at maximum volume. No wave's endpoint, and the beginning of a much longer career.
Open on YouTube
Loaded only when you press play — nothing reaches Google before that. Every second here is the uploader's own, read from the recording's tracklist.
The specifics
- Tempo
- 100-200 bpm
- Song length
- 1.5-4 min
- Tuning
- Deliberately untuned or arbitrarily tuned. Several of these musicians could not play conventionally and refused to learn, which was the position rather than the limitation.
- Production
- Harsh, dry and confrontational, recorded fast and cheap. Brian Eno produced the compilation that defined the genre, which is the only thing about it that was well funded.
- Written about
- Refusal, Violence, The city, Nothing, aggressively
What each part is doing
- Guitar Slide, prepared strings and single notes hammered without vibrato, in no key. Rhythm is the only organising principle and frequently there is not much of that.
- Bass Repetitive and mechanical, holding a figure while everything else refuses to.
- Drums Tribal, tom-heavy and unswinging, borrowed from free jazz rather than from rock. This is the element that most obviously survives into what came after.
- Saxophone Played in the free-jazz manner as noise rather than melody, on several of the key records.
- Vocals Shrieked, spoken or barked, with no melodic content at all — Lydia Lunch's delivery is closer to theatre than to singing.
What it isn't
That it was a scene that failed. It lasted about three years and produced very few records, which was the intention — several of the participants regarded longevity as the enemy. Its influence is out of all proportion to its size: noise rock, much of what became alternative, and a good deal of avant-garde metal all trace back to a handful of gigs in Lower Manhattan.
Told apart from
- Post-punk Post-punk kept the song and no wave did not. They are contemporaneous, share a city and a scene, and differ on whether a chorus is worth having. Side by side →
- Noise rock Noise rock is what happened when no wave's ideas met people who could play — Sonic Youth are the direct link and formed out of this scene. Side by side →
- Punk rock No wave was a rejection of punk as much as of rock: by 1978 punk had a uniform and a sound, and this was the New York answer to that. Side by side →
- Industrial rock Both are hostile and machine-adjacent. Industrial rock built a method; no wave deliberately refused to. Side by side →
The genres this one is most often mistaken for. Written, not derived.
History
The No New York compilation, produced by Brian Eno in 1978, captured the scene on a single record. Bands usually lasted under two years and played in Lower East Side galleries. The influence is out of all proportion: noise rock, a good deal of today's post-punk, and Swans, who have continued for forty-five years, all come from here.
Descended from
Siblings on this branch