The Modern Dance

The Modern Dance (1978) is the foundational Cleveland post-punk record. David Thomas’s vocals are theatrical and uncomfortable in ways that punk wasn’t; the guitar is deliberately industrial; the rhythm section does things that don’t resolve the way rock rhythms are supposed to. It directly inspired Joy Division and Sonic Youth, and the connection from this record to the No Wave scene and from there to the alternate-tuning approach Sonic Youth built their method on is not metaphorical.

Cleveland in the late ’70s had a noise-rock underground operating largely independently of both the New York and UK scenes, and The Modern Dance is its clearest document. The post-punk lineage it represents — music dismantling rock structure from the inside — is the same lineage that feeds into industrial, ambient, and electronic music.