New wave was, well, new in the 1980s, and many songs from that genre were quite strange compared to more traditional music of the time. But some new wave songs were weirder than others, especially in the early years of the 80s. Let’s look at a few excellent and fully danceable new wave songs that are still too weird to ignore (in a good way)!
“Ieya” by Toyah from ‘The Blue Meanings’ (1980)
Did this particular new wave song start a bout of music-induced dance hysteria? According to Toyah frontwoman Toyah Willcox, that’s sort of what happened when “Ieya” was performed live for the first time.
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“So we walked on stage and started ‘Ieya’, and within the first sixteen bars the audience was behaving in a way I’d never seen before,” said Willcox. “And because ‘Ieya’ had no real form, we’d only ever jammed it, what should have been a four-minute song went on for twenty minutes, and the audience didn’t stop dancing once, and I just kept making up words as I went along.”
“Ieya” would later be released as a single and peak at No. 3 on the UK Independent Singles chart.
“Crosseyed And Painless” by Talking Heads from ‘Remain In Light’ (1980)
Talking Heads got strange with their music often. But “Crosseyed And Painless” is a particularly odd song from their iconic album Remain In Light. Too strange, in fact, that it didn’t quite make it to the pop chart in the US. It did, however, become Talking Heads’ most successful song on the dance chart.
“Crosseyed And Painless” boasts a ton of unusual instrumental choices, from cowbells to congas to electronic sound blips to almost funky rhythms. It’s frantic from start to finish but never really peaks at all.
“New Toy” by Lene Lovich from ‘New Toy’ (1981)
Any electronic musician out there knows how much fun it is to get a synthesizer for the first time and just go to town with it. That was the case for “New Toy”, written by Thomas Dolby, who was having quite a time with his brand new Fairlight CMI synth. With it, he put together this song for Lene Lovich.
This entry on our list of weird new wave songs from the 1980s is full of bizarre vocal tricks. And it’s all beautifully accompanied by the chaos of the Fairlight.
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