Marquee Moon

Marquee Moon is one of those albums that rearranges your sense of what a guitar band can sound like. Released in 1977, in the shadow of punk but totally disinterested in its rulebook, Television’s debut sounds like it emerged from a parallel timeline. It’s sharp-edged but expansive, cerebral but charged with streetlight romance.

Tom Verlaine’s guitar work with Richard Lloyd feels more like duelling monologues than rhythm and lead—spiralling, jagged, instinctive. Every note lands like it’s chasing something just out of reach. There’s a looseness to the record, but never a lack of control. The title track alone is nearly 11 minutes of knife-edged tension, coiling and uncoiling in real time. And yet the band always knows when to pull back, to let things breathe. “Venus” and “Guiding Light” offer moments of eerie clarity before things slip back into the tangle.

Lyrically, Verlaine writes like a ghost watching the city from a fire escape. He’s poetic, cryptic, oddly tender. Marquee Moon feels like walking alone through New York just before dawn, cigarette smoke and neon still clinging to the skyline.

No other record quite sounds like it. Even now, it still buzzes with that feeling of a band stumbling into something magic and unrepeatable. Essential listening, not just for post-punk fans, but for anyone who wants to understand how far a guitar can take you.