Television

Television arrived in New York's Bowery in 1974 and proceeded to do something nobody had attempted: marry the intellectual urgency of the Velvet Underground to jazz-influenced extended guitar dialogues, on songs that ran eight minutes without anyone noticing. Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd developed an interlocking guitar language that owed more to Coltrane than to Chuck Berry — long, melodic, asymmetric lines that crossed and answered each other like two people finishing each other's sentences.

Marquee Moon (1977) is one of the most fully-realized debut albums in rock history. The title track alone — eleven minutes of ratcheting tension, false resolutions, and a guitar solo that keeps turning a corner and opening into larger space — established the template for ambitious indie guitar music. Television were never quite post-punk (too clean, too joyful in their virtuosity) and never quite punk (too patient, too respectful of craft). They occupied a space of their own that many subsequent guitar acts spent decades trying to articulate.