Television

Television emerged from New York’s mid-’70s punk scene with an idiosyncratic sound that presaged the rise of alt-rock a decade later.

Embracing the scene’s scrappy bohemianism but not its three-chord simplicity, the quartet instead fused Tom Verlaine’s bookish lyrics and snaking compositions with his and fellow guitarist Richard Lloyd’s jazz-informed melodies and harmonics.

Verlaine had originally co-founded Television with bassist and future punk icon Richard Hell, but Hell was gone by the recording of 1977's Marquee Moon.