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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Industrial rock Both are hostile and machine-adjacent. Industrial rock built a method; no wave deliberately refused to.
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