One of the most important aspects of the 80s music scene is how it more tangibly shaped genres that had started to emerge in the 70s. Specifically, there were a lot of rock and rock-adjacent bands that were way ahead of their time, and those trailblazing qualities were invaluable to the future of music.
Below, you’ll find a list of four incredible 80s acts that made music far beyond their era, and they each remain legendary to this day.
Fugazi
Born from the ashes of another ahead-of-its-time band, Minor Threat, Washington D.C.’s Fugazi changed the shape of post-hardcore. The genre may have started earlier in the 80s, with Hüsker Dü and Minutemen, for example, but it was Fugazi that took the concept and molded it into a sound that would go unrivaled for many years.
Punk icon Ian MacKaye formed Fugazi in the late 80s, with the band dropping their first album, 13 Songs, in September 1989. To this day, it remains a brilliant example of MacKaye’s foresight for where music could go.
Pixes
It feels so obvious to call the Pixies “ahead of their time,” but it’s just true. Few bands can take all their influences and inspirations into account when writing music and still create something wholly original. The Pixies are one of those bands.
Their 1988 project, Surfer Rosa, is a great example. Let’s focus on the band’s 1989 masterpiece, Doolittle, though. That record is track after track of eclectic, inventive alt-rock. You can hear how what they were doing ended up becoming a major muse for bands years down the road.
The Jesus and Mary Chain
I’ve long waxed eloquent on my love for shoegaze, and these dudes right here are the fountainhead.
The Jesus and Mary Chain were formed in East Kilbride, Scotland, in 1983 by brothers Jim and William Reid. Two years later, the band released their debut album, Psychocandy (1985). They then followed that up with two more heaters: Darklands (1987) and Automatic (1989).
Hands down, this is one of the best three-album runs of the 80s. They forged the path for gaze-rock and noise-pop, which would go on to be a big part of the early 90s underground music scene, eventually having a third explosion decades later.
Melvins
It’s impossible to understate how crucial the Melvins have been to the evolution of music. Since forming in Washington state in 1983, the band has been several steps ahead of everything happening around them in the music scene.
While they didn’t start putting out records until the late 80s, their presence in the Seattle music scene was transformative and influential. The grunge scene as we know it simply would not exist without the Melvins being so creative and so ballsy about it.
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