The Metro, two nights ago. Some band I can't remember opened for some band I didn't stay for. Walked home along Milwaukee, ears still ringing, jeans too tight, that specific post-show energy where you feel like starting a record label or spray-painting something or finally texting the person you shouldn't text. That energy has a shelf life of about six blocks. By the time I hit my apartment, I'm just a guy with sore feet who has to work tomorrow.
But this playlist—LET'S GO!, which sounds like something someone yelled at me leaving the venue—this captures that window. Fifty-five minutes of 1978 to 1983, when punk splintered into new wave and post-punk and a dozen other hyphenates that all meant the same thing: nervous energy, cheap synthesizers, and the certainty that something had to happen right now.
DEVO's "Uncontrollable Urge" starts it. Mark Mothersbaugh's synth stabs like someone jabbing the crosswalk button seventeen times. You don't ease into this playlist. You're dropped into it, already moving. X's "Los Angeles" follows—John Doe and Exene's voices tangled like arguing in a car—and Joe Jackson's "Got The Time" hits before you've processed either. Three tracks, three minutes each, zero recovery time. The first mile always lies to you. These three tracks tell the truth.
What this playlist understands—what whoever sequenced this understands—is that new wave wasn't about being slick. It was about being wired. The B-52's "52 Girls" sounds like a party, but Kate Pierson's vocals are just controlled panic over a drum machine. The Clean's "Beatnik" comes from New Zealand's Flying Nun label, all jangle-pop shimmer, but there's something twitchy underneath. Adam and the Ants doing "Beat My Guest" is literally about S&M, but sure, let's run to it. The Flowerpot Men's "Beat City" showed up in Ferris Bueller's Day Off during the parade scene, which tells you everything about how this music functions: it makes you feel like you're getting away with something.
Here's where it shifts. The English Beat's "Click Click"—2 Tone ska, all upstrokes and urgency—leads into Romeo Void's "Never Say Never," which is Debora Iyall's voice doing things that shouldn't work over a walking bassline, and Missing Persons' "Mental Hopscotch," where Dale Bozzio sings like she's reading a ransom note she wrote to herself. This is the playlist's weird middle: the moment where new wave tips into something stranger, more anxious, less sure of itself.
Then Johnny Thunders shows up.
"Born to Lose" doesn't belong here sonically—it's 1975 proto-punk, sloppy and doomed—but emotionally, it's the hinge. Thunders died in 1991 from drugs, obviously, but he sounds dead already on this track. It's the opposite of all the synthetic energy that came before it. And that's why it works. You're ten tracks in, probably three miles in, and your body's starting to negotiate. This track says: there's no negotiating. You're already doing it.
X returns with their Doors cover "Soul Kitchen." X doing Doors makes sense—both LA bands, both obsessed with American darkness—but hearing Exene over that riff after Johnny Thunders is like remembering why you're running in the first place. You run away from things or toward things, never just for fitness.
The back half is all fuel. Death's "Keep On Knocking"—three Black kids from Detroit in 1974 inventing punk before anyone called it that. Agent Orange's surf-punk "Mr. Moto." The Saints' "I'm Stranded" from Brisbane, 1976. Ramones doing "Havana Affair," which is ninety-five seconds because Joey couldn't sustain a note longer than that. Stiff Little Fingers screaming "Alternative Ulster" from Belfast. These aren't deep cuts if you worked at a record store. These are the tracks you'd play to prove a point to someone arguing that punk started in London.
Squeeze's "Another Nail In My Heart" is the only moment of melody, of actual tunefulness, in the final stretch. Glenn Tilbrook's voice does this thing—he sounds sad even when he's singing fast. Sham 69's "Borstal Breakout" brings it back to sloganeering and three chords. Wine Lips' "Dead Beat" closes it—a Toronto garage-punk band, recent enough that I can't claim I saw them first, doing exactly what DEVO did at the start: making nervous energy sound like a life philosophy.
Top 5 producers who have a sound you can hear immediately: 1) Brian Eno on the Talking Heads records—that clarity, that space. 2) Martin Hannett on Joy Division—every drum hit sounds like it's happening in a concrete stairwell. 3) Flood on Nick Cave and Depeche Mode—lush but somehow still dangerous. 4) Steve Albini on everything—you hear the room, the amps, the mistakes. 5) Butch Vig on Nevermind—the snare sound that defined a decade. Honorable mention: Anyone who recorded the Ramones. Didn't matter. They sounded like the Ramones.
This playlist doesn't have a story. It has a feeling. The feeling of walking home from a show, convinced something has to happen. The feeling lasts six blocks, or fifty-five minutes, or however long it takes to convince yourself that the energy is real and not just ringing in your ears.
