Pink Flag
Wire's debut is the smartest record of the '77 punk explosion, a formally seamless suite of 21 songs in 35 minutes, edited to the bone and graced with allusive, thoughtful lyrics, howled by Colin Newman like political slogans. The band's crisp, precise snap gets an awful lot of mileage out of their three-and-a-half chords, and their attack never lets up. The album's minimal structures and snarly guitar sound are still hugely influential ("12XU" has been covered many times, and Elastica's "Connection" is basically a rewrite of "Three Girl Rhumba"), and its sequence is so perfect that the band that opened for Wire on their reunion tour ten years later simply played Pink Flag straight through, including between-song pauses.--Douglas Wolk