Remain in Light

Talking Heads went to the Bahamas in the summer of 1980 with Brian Eno and almost no finished songs. That was the plan. Instead of writing tracks and then recording them, they built the album from the ground up in the studio, layering loops and rhythms and textures until something started to emerge from the noise. It was a genuinely radical way to work, borrowed not from rock music but from the Afrobeat of Fela Kuti and the polyrhythmic traditions of West African music that Byrne and Eno had been obsessively studying. They wanted to make something you could dance to that also made your brain do something it had never done before.

What came out was forty minutes that do not sound like anything that existed before them and that somehow still sound like nothing made since. The album opens with "Born Under Punches" and immediately the ground shifts. The rhythm is not where you expect it to be. Multiple percussion layers move against each other in patterns that create a groove so deep it almost has gravity. Then Byrne's voice comes in, frantic and preacher-like, delivering words that feel urgent and almost meaningless at the same time, which turns out to be exactly the point.

"Once in a Lifetime" is the track that most people know. The music video showed Byrne jerking and convulsing across a bare stage while asking, in the voice of a man who has just woken up inside his own life and cannot quite believe what he sees: well, how did I get here? It is a song about the slow accumulation of circumstances that turn into an existence, about looking around at the house and the car and the years and not being entirely sure how any of it happened. It sounds like a panic attack that somehow learned to dance.

The rest of the album moves through the same territory. "Crosseyed and Painless" is one of the most purely physical pieces of music this band ever made, a locked groove that barely varies for five minutes and that is somehow more compelling at the end than at the start. "The Overload" closes everything in near-silence, a landscape of dread so effective that Joy Division reportedly inspired it, except the members of Talking Heads had never actually heard Joy Division and arrived at the same place by accident.

This is an album about the strangeness of being a conscious creature moving through the modern world. It makes that strangeness feel like something you can move to. That combination has never been pulled off more completely by anyone, before or since.