Before Wire took their first extended hiatus in the early ’80s, they released what would end up being their most complex album — the diverse, challenging and hallucinatory art-punk masterpiece, 154. Named for the number of gigs the band had played up to that point, it marked not only a creative peak for the group, but the point where the individual musicians were at their tightest. Wire in 1979 certainly sounded like a band that had 154 shows under their belt, and could probably tear through another 154 without missing a beat. They were no longer a scrappy band of upstarts with a skewed approach to the power chord — they were a tightly wound unit, locking into place with stunning precision. You can hear it in Robert Gotobed’s opening drum fill on “A Single K.O.,” or on the tense repetition of “Two People In A Room.” They’re fucking on.

Yet for as tight as Wire sounds on 154, it’s a very stylistically loose album. Many of its highlights are beefier, heavier extensions of the abrasive post-punk sounds they explored on Chairs Missing, like the scratchy new wave jitters of “On Returning,” or the perpetually building “Blessed State.” But on several occasions, the group takes bizarre, eerie detours into ambiance and spoken word abstraction, like “The Other Window,” which tells the story of a man on a train, watching a horse die as its tangled in a barbed-wire fence. It’s unsettling, to say the least. 

The valley between the more accessible moments on 154 and the peculiar, experimental ones is vast, though the album is paced well enough that it all more or less makes sense as part of the greater whole. And yet, two songs stand a little bit taller than the rest: “The 15th” and “Map Ref 41°N 93°W.” The former stacks dreamy strata of guitars beneath Colin Newman’s vocals, the lyrics of which are indecipherably abstract, but sound absolutely heavenly. The latter, however, is the catchiest new wave proto-shoegaze song ever written about cartography. It’s probably the only new wave proto-shoegaze song ever written about cartography, but it just so happens that this one is exceptionally good. Not that there’s a single bad track in the bunch, as experimental and unconventional as some of them are. They broke up a year later, famously saying they had run out of ideas, and considering how many they crammed onto this record, it’s easy to see how they might’ve run out of steam. While Wire didn’t stay broken up for long after this album, had they taken their final bow here, their legacy would have been essentially flawless.