Post-Punk
The 10 Best Post-Punk
Tracks of All Time
What British and American bands did with punk's permission once its three chords ran out. Bass leads, guitars scrape rather than strum, and the rhythm section quietly imports funk, dub and German rock.
- Origin
- United Kingdom, 1978
- Tempo
- 110–160 BPM
- Also known as
- postpunk, new wave, no wave
- Tracks
- 10
- Updated
- 2026-08-29
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Number 1: Joy Division / Love Will Tear Us Apart
1980 · Factory
Peter Hook plays the melody on bass, Bernard Sumner plays the atmosphere on a cheap synth, and Ian Curtis writes the plainest lyric of his life. The genre's one unarguable pop record.
Number 2: Public Image Ltd / Public Image
1978 · Virgin
Lydon's first act after the Sex Pistols is to hire a dub bass player and make the guitar ring rather than chug. A resignation letter from punk, delivered as a single.
Also on Roots, The Waxonia Desk — The Hundred
Number 3: Gang of Four / Damaged Goods
1978 · Fast Product
Andy Gill treats the guitar as a percussion instrument that mostly stays silent. The politics are in the arrangement as much as the lyric, which is what separates this band from everyone who copied them.
Also on The Waxonia Desk — The Hundred
Number 5: Talking Heads / Once in a Lifetime
1980 · Sire
Eno and the band build a looped Afro-funk bed and David Byrne has a public breakdown on top of it. Post-punk's most joyful record is also its most panicked.
Also on The Waxonia Desk — The Hundred
Number 6: The Slits / Typical Girls
1979 · Island
Dennis Bovell producing, so the reggae is real rather than borrowed. The Slits play deliberately loose against a lyric that dismantles every expectation the title sets up.
Number 7: Cabaret Voltaire / Nag Nag Nag
1979 · Rough Trade
Sheffield industrialists run everything through distortion until the individual parts stop being identifiable. The link between post-punk and the electronic body music that followed it is right here.
Number 8: Magazine / Shot by Both Sides
1978 · Virgin
Howard Devoto leaves the Buzzcocks and immediately makes something more literate and more anxious. The riff is punk; the structure underneath it is not remotely.
Number 9: Bauhaus / Bela Lugosi's Dead
1979 · Small Wonder
Nine minutes of dub delay, brushed drums and vamping, recorded live in one take. Absurd and completely committed, and gothic rock begins the moment it finishes.
Also on The Waxonia Desk — Both Rooms