Art-Rock • Afrobeat-inspired • New Wave • Sire Records
Remain in Light is what happens when a nervy New York art-rock band becomes obsessed with Fela Kuti, studio technology, and the question “What if the groove never stopped?” Instead of writing songs in the usual verse-chorus way, Talking Heads and producer Brian Eno build loops, chant over them, and stack overdubs until the tracks feel less like songs and more like living ecosystems.
The opening trio – “Born Under Punches (The Heat Goes On),” “Crosseyed and Painless,” “The Great Curve” – is basically a three-part thesis. Guitars become percussion. Percussion becomes melody. Basslines run marathons while David Byrne’s lyrics spiral into paranoid koans about identity, modern life, and bodies that don’t quite fit the world they’re in. It’s anxious music you can dance to, or dance music you can get anxious to, depending on your mood.
Beneath the surface, there’s a deep engagement with African diasporic rhythm – not just in the obvious polyrhythms and call-and-response vocals, but in the way the band thinks about repetition as transcendence. Eno treats the studio like an extra bandmember, looping and mutating performances, smearing synths and found sounds through the mix. On “The Great Curve,” guest guitarist Adrian Belew turns in a solo that sounds like a tape being eaten by the machine in real time, yet it somehow folds perfectly into the grid.
Side two shifts the mood without abandoning the experiment. “Once in a Lifetime” takes a preacher-like vocal cadence, a bassline that might as well be carved in stone, and overlays that famous midlife crisis monologue: “You may find yourself…” It’s a song about alienation built entirely out of elements of communal music – gospel, funk, African highlife – which is exactly the kind of conceptual tension this album thrives on.
The influence map radiating out of Remain in Light is ridiculous. You hear it in post-punk, in electronic dance music, in indie bands discovering polyrhythm in the 2000s, in the way pop producers now treat the DAW as an instrument. For all the debates around cultural appropriation, it also pushed a generation of rock listeners to go back and seek the source: Fela, King Sunny Adé, Afro-Caribbean funk.
Key tracks for deep listening
- “Born Under Punches (The Heat Goes On)” – count how many different guitar parts are weaving through the mix at any given moment.
- “Crosseyed and Painless” – the purest statement of the album’s rhythmic manifesto; the breakdown is like a math problem you can dance to.
- “Once in a Lifetime” – existential crisis as call-and-response sermon; the organ and backing vocals do as much storytelling as Byrne.
Why it still matters
In a list obsessed with “rock albums,” Remain in Light stands out as one that tries very hard not to be rock at all – and in the process expands what rock can be. If you’re mapping the path from guitar bands to LCD Soundsystem, Vampire Weekend, or the rhythmic experiments of modern hip-hop producers, this record is one of the big crossroads. It’s a reminder that sometimes the most radical thing a band can do is stop thinking in riffs and start thinking in loops.