Wire

London's original post-punk provocateurs, Wire have been busy breaking rock's rules since the late '70s. They began by deconstructing punk's palette with an art-school angle, answering the question, What's next? The jackhammer beat of “1 2 X U” drives home a minimal lyric repeated with manic intensity for a masterpiece of single-minded sonic savagery. Covered ten years later by R.E.M., “Strange” unleashes edgy aggression, but its sludgy guitars trudge along with a slower, more industrial attack than most punk, and its claim “There’s something going on that wasn't here before” simply can’t be denied. With its angular riffs, stop-start rhythms, and absurdist lyrics, “Ex Lion Tamer” not only inspired a host of cover versions but also gave a 21st-century band its name.

In Next Steps, Wire's sound expands into uncharted realms before your very ears.

Once their journey was underway, Wire progressed at a frantic rate, soaking up dub, dance music, electronics, and arty concepts, and spitting them back out in bold, new colors. On “Over Theirs,” barbed-wire guitars slash across a fat, forceful punk-funk groove, as intensely chanted lyrics add to a tension-packed, almost tribal feel. “Feed Me” paints a postmodern dub landscape with thick splatters of guitar dropped sparingly over minimal electronic beats for maximum dramatic impact. On latter-day track “In the Art of Stopping,” the moody murmur of Colin Newman’s elongated tones atop the manic repetition of a wrecking-ball riff offers an idea of what Michael Stipe fronting Suicide might sound like.

Walk the Wire from post-punk explosions to industrial atmospheres, in Deep Cuts.

If you’re going to take the Wire journey, don’t be surprised if it makes some abrupt turns, detours, and even a couple of quick about-faces along the way. Any band that can go from the primal punk minimalism of the rough-edged “Three Girl Rhumba” to the sweeping industrial soundscapes of “Public Place” is covering a serious amount of ground. By the time they started turning out sleek, synth-pop tunes like “So and Slow It Grows,” they’d come so far that they even changed the spelling of their name to Wir for a while. But “Smash,” from 2011’s Red Barked Tree, shows that even after three and a half decades, Wire — yes, they put the e back — can still blend punk power with artful atmospheres, and make it all look deceptively easy.

Wire used the basics of ’70s punk as their playbook, then set it on fire, and threw it out the window. Their earliest recordings are arty cousins to the punk patterns of the day — the sounds of the Sex Pistols and Clash as seen through the wrong end of a telescope. But the band matured with shocking speed; almost overnight, the songs got longer and stranger, the instruments and vocals more heavily processed, and the whole notion of rock was thrown to the wolves in favor a new mix of sounds. Funk, punk, dub, electro, ambient, art rock: it all had a place in the ever-evolving sound of Wire — an evolution you can observe firsthand on this collection of their finest moments, from quirky post-punk to sleek, modernist sound collages.