NYC No Wave

The story starts in 1970, not 1978. Alan Vega and Martin Rev formed Suicide in a New York hemorrhaging money and people, two Jewish kids from Brooklyn and the Bronx making a sound nobody had asked for. Vega had been making electronic junk sculpture before he picked up a microphone; he'd studied under the minimalist painter Ad Reinhardt and treated found materials from the city's wreckage as art supplies. Rev had a Farfisa organ and a primitive rhythm box. Together they stripped rock to its neurological core: pulse, drone, scream. They played an early show in 1971 in an art gallery, handing out flyers that called it a “Punk Music Mass”—years before anyone applied that word to a genre.

As Vega recalled, only the critic Lester Bangs had used “punk” in print before then, in a 1969 review of the Stooges. Their shows at CBGB were disasters in the best sense: Vega diving into crowds that couldn't decide whether to dance or fight back, getting beaten up regularly. The music barely resembled rock anymore, and later tours opening for the Clash, Elvis Costello and the Attractions, and the Cars regularly ended in audience riots.

By 1973, another precursor appeared upstate. Jack Ruby formed in Albany with Randy Cohen on drums and synthesizer, Boris Policeband playing viola through an FM transmitter with police walkie-talkies strapped around his waist. They sounded insane. Thurston Moore would later call them “a band whispered about from the most inner circle of no wave knowledge,” pre-dating the aesthetic by years. When bassist George Scott III moved to New York, he brought that Albany approach with him: ignore convention, make the equipment do things it wasn't designed to do. He'd end up playing with James Chance and Lydia Lunch, planting those Albany seeds in downtown soil.

The geography mattered. This was Lower Manhattan before gentrification, when artists could afford lofts along the Bowery and in Tribeca. Walk down those rubble-filled blocks in the mid-seventies and you'd check to see if your wallet was still there. The city was bankrupt, drug-addled, dangerous. The Velvet Underground's commercial failure haunted the scene like a blessing: as Brian Eno famously said, only ten thousand people bought their first album, but everyone who did formed a band. Suicide's own self-titled 1977 record followed that same quiet path—overlooked in its moment, foundational in hindsight.

Alan Vega and Martin Rev of Suicide were the acknowledged godfathers, though they'd formed years before no wave coalesced. Vega's background in electronic sculpture shaped his approach to sound—he treated the microphone like a weapon, his vocals somewhere between Elvis and a man being electrocuted. Glenn Branca would later state: “If you have to find out who the godfather of no wave was, it was Alan Vega.” Vega himself once said that when he first heard Bruce Springsteen's “State Trooper” off Nebraska, he was convinced it was a lost Suicide song he'd forgotten writing. Their 1977 self-titled album arrived like a transmission from a future where rock had been stripped to its wiring. Rev's droning Farfisa and primitive rhythm box created a hypnotic pulse over which Vega howled, sneered, preached. Those early shows frequently ended in chaos, and even years later, on tours with the Clash and the Cars, Suicide's sets could tip audiences into open riot.

Lydia Lunch arrived in New York at sixteen and immediately became the scene's most confrontational voice. With Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, she played guitar like she was strangling it, her songs rarely exceeding two minutes and often collapsing into noise before they'd properly begun. James Chance recruited her to help form the band; both would appear on Eno's No New York compilation. When Robert Barry Francos interviewed Teenage Jesus in 1977 for FFanzeen, he walked in cold, having never heard of Lunch, Chance, drummer Bradley Field, or Japanese bassist Reck. The band's contemptuous tone nearly made him scrap the piece.

Francos concluded their whole persona was bullshit obnoxiousness, a calculated gimmick for an audience that liked being assaulted so long as no one could actually get hurt (FFanzeen, 1977/2022). Lunch's aesthetic was deliberately abrasive, a necessary response to late-seventies decay. After Teenage Jesus disbanded, she formed 8 Eyed Spy, later working alongside Jack Ruby veteran George Scott III.

No wave wasn't a genre with consistent features. It was an attitude that happened to use guitars, bass, and drums. What unified these bands was what they rejected: blues scales, rock's recycled riffs, punk's speed-for-speed's-sake, new wave's commercial sheen. Suicide had cleared this ground years earlier, refusing synthesizers of the Yes-and-Genesis variety and building something closer to “electronic rockabilly”—Martin Rev's own term for one of the five loose categories he used to describe the band's sound, alongside city music, pure dance, social commentary, and 1950s-style love ballads. No wave's guitarists drew from minimalism, free jazz, and avant-garde composition instead.

The guitars were often cheap Japanese Stratocaster copies, but in the right tuning with a drum stick jammed under the frets and the amplifier pushed to distortion, they sounded like church bells or sheet metal being torn. Sonic Youth, arriving just after no wave's peak, would systematize this approach—Moore and Ranaldo used dozens of alternate tunings, often dedicating specific guitars to specific songs, their instruments prepared with screwdrivers and other objects to alter timbre. Michael Azerrad put it plainly: “cheap guitars sounded like cheap guitars. But with weird tunings or something jammed under a particular fret, those humble instruments could sound rather amazing.”

The rhythm section rarely kept things steady. Mars featured Nancy Arlen's drums as a stuttering, off-kilter pulse beneath Mark Cunningham's sliding bass and the atonal guitar interplay of Sumner Crane and China Burg. DNA took this further: Arto Lindsay's guitar sounded like it was being dismembered, Robin Crutchfield's organ added discordant stabs, and Ikue Mori's drums had no interest in keeping conventional time. The music emphasized texture over melody, confrontation over craft.

The Artists Space festival in early 1978 almost didn't produce No New York at all. When Brian Eno showed up for the final two nights—advised by Diego Cortez to check out this strange new scene—he was already in New York working on the Talking Heads album. What he saw on Friday night was DNA and the Contortions. Saturday brought Mars and Teenage Jesus and the Jerks. The music was so confrontational, so deliberately ugly, that it could have been dismissed as amateur hour. But Eno heard something else: a radical reimagining of what rock instrumentation could do. He proposed a compilation album, though his involvement would later be contentious.

James Chance insisted the Contortions' tracks were “done totally live in the studio, no separation between the instruments, no overdubs.” Later, members of other bands grumbled that Eno should have stayed home. The squabble exposed no wave's central paradox: these artists wanted documentation but resisted the commodification that came with it.

Sonic Youth's formation traced directly back to this moment. Thurston Moore arrived in New York in early 1977, initially playing in bands called Room Tone and the Coachmen. After jamming with Stanton Miranda, whose band CKM featured Kim Gordon, Moore and Gordon began playing together under various names before settling on Sonic Youth in mid-1981—the name combined MC5's Fred “Sonic” Smith with reggae artist Big Youth. They played at Noise Fest that June at White Columns gallery, where Lee Ranaldo was also performing.

No wave's immediate offspring was noise rock, a genre that wouldn't have existed without Downtown Manhattan's experiments with dissonance and texture. Suicide's fingerprints turned up decades later in places no one would have predicted in 1977: Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska, Joy Division, the Jesus and Mary Chain, and eventually the whole lineage of industrial and electroclash acts that followed (autre.love; PopMatters, 2023). Sonic Youth became the most successful band to emerge from no wave's ashes, signing to major label DGC in 1990 and headlining Lollapalooza in 1995, but they never abandoned the aesthetic principles learned from Glenn Branca and the Artists Space generation.

Their influence spread: Stephen Malkmus of Pavement credited Sonic Youth with giving him “the idea and courage” to explore alternate tunings; Sleater-Kinney cited them as inspiration for their detuned guitar sound. As Kim Gordon told SLUG Magazine in discussing their major label work, they spent about $150,000 on Dirty but “everything went really smoothly”—they'd maintained their experimental approach even with bigger budgets. By the mid-eighties, bands like Big Black, the Butthole Surfers, and Pussy Galore were grouped under Village Voice editor Robert Christgau's dismissive “pigfucker” label, but they were all no wave's grandchildren—abrasive, uncompromising, aggressively anti-commercial.

Regional scenes emerged in direct response to New York's example. The Kansai no wave movement in Osaka, Kobe, and Kyoto during the late seventies and early eighties featured bands like Aunt Sally, Inu, and groups centered around Hide and Jojo Hiroshige that would later feed into Japanoise. In Chicago, Weasel Walter of the Flying Luttenbachers began describing his scene in similar terms, carrying the no wave method forward a generation.