Gary Numan

Since 1977 · United Kingdom

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The Pleasure Principle (1979)

The Pleasure Principle is the record where Gary Numan committed fully to the synthesizer, building an entire album with no guitars at all — just banks of keyboards, Chris Payne's viola, and a rhythm section drilled into something close to machine precision. "Cars" is the obvious anchor, a paranoid, claustrophobic song about the isolation of driving that became one of the era's most recognizable synth hooks almost by accident. "Metal" pushes the same detachment further, Numan's voice flattened into something between confession and readout. It's a record that treats the synthesizer as a genuinely new instrument rather than a substitute for old ones, and a good deal of synth-pop's early vocabulary comes directly from it.

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Gary Numan

The Pleasure Principle · 1979

Gary Numan built his early sound in the London post-punk scene of the late 1970s, first as the singer of Tubeway Army before deciding, almost overnight, that guitars were no longer necessary. Replicas (1979), released under the Tubeway Army name but effectively a solo record, introduced the detached, replicant-like persona and Philip K. Dick-inflected themes that would define his early work — synthesizers doing the job guitars once did, played with a coldness that felt genuinely alien on pop radio at the time.

The Pleasure Principle, released later the same year fully under his own name, dropped guitars almost entirely and built its sound instead from synthesizers, viola, and a tight, mechanical rhythm section. Numan's commercial fortunes cooled through the 1980s as his sound became less fashionable, but a run of darker, more industrial-leaning albums beginning in the 1990s found him newly championed by a generation of American industrial and metal acts who'd grown up on his early records. He has continued recording and touring steadily since.