Talking Heads are having a pretty incredible run for a band that broke up 35 years ago.
In 2017, Selena Gomez rode one of Tina Weymouth's slippery basslines all the way to the Top 20. The band's landmark concert film, 1984's Stop Making Sense, made a triumphant 4K cinema tour in 2023 that literally had people dancing in the aisles. The recent tribute album Everyone's Getting Involved boasts covers from Miley Cyrus, Lorde, the National and Teezo Touchdown. Director Mike Mills recently dropped a new visual for "Psycho Killer" that features a powerhouse performance from Saoirse Ronan; the best music video of 2025 is for a song that's 48 years old. And, at 73 years old, frontman David Byrne spent his summer vacation singing along onstage with Olivia Rodrigo at Governor's Ball.
Emerging in 1975 with button-down shirts and sensible haircuts, this band of four art-school alumni were the Anthony Michael Hall of the CBGBs Breakfast Club. (The Ramones = Emilio Estevez, the Dead Boys = Judd Nelson, Blondie = Molly Ringwald, Patti Smith = Ally Sheedy, don't @ me). Wringing the emotionally rich from the mundane, Talking Heads quipped their songs were about "buildings and food," but they were also about maps, cities, highways, houses and televisions. Across eight records, they went from outré punks to new wave innovators to "worldbeat" ambassadors to MTV-certified pop stars and, ultimately, to art-rock royalty, a storied career that had music critics reaching for synonyms for "arch" and "nervy" to this day.
Here's an attempt to rank the best of a band that could be avant-garde as their Robert Rauschenberg cover art but universal enough to get covered by Kermit the Frog, stiff enough to give Radiohead a band name but funky enough to get sampled on a Jay-Z song. We'll take that ride.
In the only cover song Talking Heads ever recorded, the band drags Al Green's "Take Me to the River" into the new wave swamp. Producer Brian Eno suggested the group turn the 1974 soul classic into a slo-mo lurch, and the band was rewarded with their first Top 40 hit.
A song about breaking bedtime to party with your baby brother—the type of quirked-out guilty-pleasure novelty fluke that did gangbusters back in the days when "alternative music" was called "college rock."
The ecstatic opening to what may be the Heads' best album, 1978's More Songs About Buildings and Food, rides Chris Frantz' galloping march and Jerry Harrison's funky chicken-scratch into 131 seconds of art-punk euphoria.
"That song was really intended to be in praise of appliances," said Byrne about his sparkling attempt to sympathize with suburban uniformity. Let the Sex Pistols rant about no future under the fascist regime; Byrne found pathos in lines like "Some civil servants are just like my loved ones/They work so hard and they try to be strong."
A funky rave-up that means it's time for someone to saunter out in a big, grey suit.
An uncomplicated rock song with typically atypical lyrics ("I'm wearing fur pajamas/I ride a hot potato"), the lead single to Byrne's excellent small-town satire True Stories would be the band's biggest hit of their mid-to-late-'80s deceleration.
Riding a pastoral Afro-French groove, "(Nothing But) Flowers" plays like Joni Mitchell's "Big Yellow Taxi" for someone whose idea of paradise is a parking lot.
This beaming, mythlike song is technically a David Byrne solo joint penned for choreographer Twyla Tharpe's "The Catherine Wheel," but the Talking Heads shot it into the stratosphere when they performed it in their seminal concert film Stop Making Sense.
A punk-funk classic that anticipates the Clash's Combat Rock. David Byrne imagines himself pining for the disco as bullets fly overhead.
The ultimate ballad from a band that should be allergic to ballads, David Byrne imagines heaven as a place on Earth—and nothing happens there.
Talking Heads would regularly end their legendary 1983 tour with this incredibly funky stew of interlocking rhythms and swooning melody. Drummer Chris Frantz suggested the bridge, which liberally borrows from a then-emerging genre of music known as "hip-hop." Featuring a ripping guitar solo from King Crimson/David Bowie guitarist Adrian Belew, the song didn't storm the pop charts like some of their other singles, but made a nice impact on the dance charts.
David Byrne knew "a blissed-out hippie-chick" who used to trip on LSD and lay down in a field next to a Yoo-Hoo factory in Baltimore. The convergence of out-of-body sensations and mass-produced chocolate beverage was striking enough to inspire an undeniable pop gem.
Written by the band during their days at the Rhode Island School of Design, "Psycho Killer" is like Michael Powell's Peeping Tom set to an art-funk stomp. Through pure coincidence, it was released shortly after the Son of Sam panic in New York City, though Byrne was channeling shock-rocker Alice Cooper and the storytelling ballads of Randy Newman. Weymouth conjured up the bridge in French, inhabiting the mind of pop culture's first psycho-killer superstar, Norman Bates: "Je me lance, vers la gloire," or "I launch myself towards glory."
Looking for a path out of traditional rock music on their third album, 1979's Fear of Music, Talking Heads turned to their love of Nigerian highlife and South African mbaqanga, finding their new groove through polyrhythm and repetition. Giddy opening track "I Zimbra" is a swirl of layers upon layers percussion complemented by otherworldly guitar noise from King Crimson's Robert Fripp. The lyrics are indeed pure nonsense, but not just any nonsense: On the suggestion of producer and fellow art school alum Brian Eno, they were pulled from the wordless sound poems of Dadiast icon Hugo Ball.
Though only a minor hit in its time (peaking at No. 62), the most ~~vibey~~ Talking Heads song has naturally risen in legend to be the choice jam for millennials and zoomers. "This Must Be the Place" is Byrne's attempt at writing a real love song, the subtitle "Naive Melody" references the band messing around on a Prophet-5 synthesizer to get its innocent Kuti-gone-Kraftwerk feel. Byrne will tell you the lyrics are randomness and the most honest song he ever wrote in the same breath. "It's really sweet," said Chris Frantz, "quite an accomplishment for a band such as ours."
Working like an answer record to their own "Don't Worry About the Government," "The Big Country" is a scathing country-rock dismantling of conformity and order. Years later, Byrne would claim lines like "I wouldn't live there if you paid me" were actually intended as a parody of a big-city snob’s dim view of flyover country. Talking Heads songs were always a constant conversation between their fascination and critique of American sprawl, making this the "Okie From Muskogee" of city kids going out to visit their suburban grandmas. No one but David Byrne can wring this much feeling from words like “parkways.”
In the days before "This Must be the Place," a David Byrne "love song" would most assuredly be about architecture. Recorded as a trio before the band absorbed (actual architecture major!) Jerry Harrison as their guitarist, the song worked almost as a mission statement: the city as a metaphor, emotionlessness as emotion and lyrics that exist somewhere between the sardonic and the evocative ("It's not love/Which is my face/Which is a building/Which is on fire." Disco producer Tony Bongiovi (who was also working on Meco's interstellar novelty Star Wars and Other Galactic Funk) added the horn section, turning the song's wry lyrics into something exuberant.
The song Byrne called a "joyful look at doom" is a delirious piece of apocalypse zydeco. "Road to Nowhere" is the dizzy peak of the band's retreat into somewhat simple pop songs after the ambitious rhythmic insanity of the Stop Making Sense era. Built on two chords and a marching rhythm from Chris Frantz, the song crescendos to wonderful peaks of accordion (by Jimmy Donnell of NYC Cajun-rockers Loup Garou), washboard, saxophone, and an ad hoc gospel choir.
Still geeked from seeing the mighty Parliament-Funkadelic at Madison Square Garden, Chris Frantz came to a Heads jam repeating the party chant "Burn down the house." With songwriting credits going to all four members, it was truly a victory of the band's improvisational skills and pop savvy. However the real MVP here is percussionist Steve Scales, who provides the most iconic tom-tom work this side of "In the Air Tonight." Byrne attempted to pen its cryptic lyrics as "basically a lot of non sequiturs that have... some kind of emotional impact." The gamble worked and it became the band's first and only Top 10 single.
You may find yourself in the place where Talking Heads reach the apotheosis of art-rock experimentation and pop genius. The irresistible groove of "Once in a Lifetime" emerged from Afrobeat-inspired jams. Byrne's stentorian delivery was inspired by preachers he heard on the radio. His lyrics ("Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down") made an existential crisis sound like a party. The music video became a staple of early MTV, the lyrics accidentally foretold the emptiness of the yuppified '80s and the off-kilter groove became the bedrock of countless rap songs, including an '80s hip-house smash for KC Flightt and a '90s hit for Jay-Z and Memphis Bleek.