Two Designers Walk Into a Bar · Evergreen Podcasts

Punk Meets Tech and New Wave is Born (Classic)

·41 min·2 clips

The Sex Pistols were on their third record company in six months and played only five of nine U.S. dates.

First, there is bar business. The cold open stalls for laughs with research avoidance, craft beers, merch, Patreon, and a painfully specific seltzer joke before the classic episode starts rolling. Then 1977 hits. The hosts frame it as the peak year for vinyl sales in the United States, with almost 350 million albums sold before cassettes and CDs changed the room. That decline gives them a neat physical marker to work from, the kind of object-level clue this show loves. Punk supplies the spark. The episode treats new wave as punk's offshoot, then digs into how rawness, chaos, and DIY energy turned into something more melodic and synthetic. The fit is a little awkward, and one host says so. That tension is useful because it opens the design-history thread. The old guard sounds tired here. Rock, pop, disco, and fashion are painted as overproduced and overexposed, exactly the kind of thing younger bands wanted to push against. Malcolm McLaren's shop enters the story, with Sex treated less like a normal store than an art project with a cash register. Then come the contracts. The Cars, Devo, and the Police show punk's ideas getting picked up by bands with wider creative reach. Devo gets real affection in a quick aside, but the conversation stays on the bigger move from rebellion into a more visible musical and visual language. MTV is waiting down the line. By the end, new wave has become memory too: teens, college days, and one host being gently nudged back toward the bar. The nostalgia has a job. It helps the hosts watch formats, scenes, shops, bands, and music video culture change what sounded modern.

As heard by us

A loose, lively look at how punk bent into new wave.

The episode traces punk's push against the establishment and the way new wave carried that rebellion into a cleaner, more synthetic form. It anchors the argument in specifics: 1977 vinyl sales peaking at almost 350 million albums, several bands signing their first record…

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Why you'd press play

You want punk turning into new wave, with design talk and bar-side banter.

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