First of all, let’s hear it for 1977. Those 12 glorious months saw the release of debut albums by Elvis Costello, the Clash, the Damned, Suicide, Television, Richard Hell And The Voidoids, the Stranglers, the Saints, the Sex Pistols, and Talking Heads. And that’s before we even get to albums by veterans like Kraftwerk, Iggy Pop, and David Bowie, as well as the second and third albums by the Ramones. And arriving in December, coming in right before the final curtain with 21 songs in 35 minutes, is Wire’s incredible debut, Pink Flag.

Both a product of the 1977 punk explosion and on a different plane entirely, Pink Flag is an art rock record in punk clothing. Indeed, its fuzzy and youthful minute-long bangers paralleled the rawness of contemporaries like the Clash and the Damned. And the quartet still had a ways to go before sharpening their instrumental skills, which makes the album unpolished, but far from chaotic (the one chaotic element — guitarist George Gill, prone to shouting “FUCK!” during performances — had been ejected from the band before recording). But while Pink Flag has all the elements of your basic punk rock record, the way the band pieces them all together is something far less recognizable as such, and much more progressive.

The word that’s typically thrown around when discussing Pink Flag is “minimal,” but it’s not for a shortage of ideas. The minimalism is in the structure of the songs themselves; the band has said in the past that they ended a song whenever it ran out of words, and in this case, that leaves 13 of 21 songs with a running time of less than 90 seconds, and of those 13, six are under a minute. It’s to Wire’s credit, then, that nothing feels unfinished or undercooked. The shortest song of the bunch, “Field Day For The Sundays,” runs a tight 28 seconds, with just one verse and one chorus, and absolutely nothing else. It’s a marvel of British engineering. 

By comparison, the longer songs feel utterly monumental. Opening track “Reuters,” with its ominous, single-chord opening drone, doesn’t even sound like it should be on a punk album. And it only becomes more unsettling and disorienting toward the end of the song, with its brief chant of “Looting! Burning! Rape!/ Rape/ Rape.” And there’s a slinky groove to “Lowdown,” but its funk is oddly menacing. But in the album’s most accessible moments — and there are quite a few — Wire sheds some of that darkness for something more fun. “Ex Lion Tamer” is one of a few songs that actually arrives at a chorus more than once, and that chorus of “Stay glued to your TV set!” is likewise the one most likely to elicit sing-alongs. But I can’t wrap this up without talking about “Three Girl Rhumba,” the hip-swinging new-waver that was the basis for the riff in Elastica’s “Connection.” It led to an out-of-court settlement and a permanent change in the songwriting credits for “Connection,” but there’s also a fair argument that Elastica introduced Wire to a generation that might not have otherwise heard of them. Twenty years later, I can’t help but envy the teenagers of today, who get to experience Pink Flag for the first time.