The Television were the most important band of New York's early New Wave period. Alongside what Pere Ubu were doing in Ohio, Television’s music effectively defined the aesthetics of the New Wave: altering the rock song with sonic gestures that expressed the neuroses of a youth raised without the ideals of the 1960s. Television also reinvented the role of the electric guitar within rock music, transforming it into an instrument more akin to the sitar of raga and the viola of John Cale than to the generational call of Chuck Berry. In an era (punk) when guitar solos were practically illegal, Television elevated the sound of the guitar to a metaphysical icon.

Television were a product of the punk attitude, yet they were in reality connected to the sound of the old psychedelic underground, dark and acid, particularly the almost mystical sound of the Velvet Underground. Television were more rooted in tradition than they wanted to admit: their lyrics were symbolic and allegorical like those of Bob Dylan and Jim Morrison (but filtered through the “hard-boiled” surrealism of writers like Paul Auster and Peter Carey), and their “jamming” was influenced by the free-jazz of John Coltrane.

Tom Verlaine (born Tom Miller) emerged from Manhattan’s intellectual circles much like Patti Smith. Verlaine was equally fascinated by decadent poetry (as his pseudonym suggests), but he found his vocation in the guitar. What made him famous were his dissonant accompaniments and unpleasant solos, both based on the monotonous repetition of the same phrase, varying only the timbre.

A former longshoreman and bookstore clerk, but an amateur guitarist since 1967 alongside Billy Ficca, Verlaine met Richard Hell in 1972, editor of an underground fanzine. With Richard Lloyd on rhythm guitar, the pair formed the Neon Boys. Two years later, Fred Smith replaced Hell on bass, Ficca took over drums, and Verlaine assumed leadership of the group, which then changed its name to Television. Verlaine invented their look and secured gigs at CBGB’s. Their first single, Little Johnny Jewel (December 1975), along with Patti Smith’s Piss Factory, became one of the manifestos of the New Wave.

The most distinctive features of their cathartic sonic purges were Verlaine’s “staccato” singing—piercing and detached, dreamy and robotic, shrill and emotionless—and the often dissonant interweaving of the two guitars: neurotic, jagged, sharp, and plaintive. Their long jams drew inspiration both from free jazz improvisations (Ayler, Coltrane) and from psychedelic groups (Grateful Dead), always imbued with a depressed, anemic tone.

On their first album, Marquee Moon (Elektra, 1977), Verlaine reinvented Lou Reed’s detached cynicism with passionate refinement, framing it within a lattice of anguished guitar chords. The cruel, obsessive torture of the strings became their most characteristic rock trait and the main reason their style was often considered overworked to the point of nausea.
The album exudes existential unease on every track: Venus, a martial folk-rock horrifically distorted; See No Evil, a chilling garage-rock; Friction, a stumbling blues-rock dissonant with metronomic irregularities; Elevation, an atmospheric ballad tuned to the chiming of guitars; Prove It, a flamenco/ waltz hybrid steeped in exoticism. More than songs, they are flashes that tear through the desolate landscape of urban alienation, marked by a mood that mixes melancholy and arrogance, bravado and despair.
The two long jams, Marquee Moon and Torn Curtain, are slow descents into the depths of consciousness: the former drives vehemently, fractured, with its complex instrumental interlude forming the transcendent apex of the album, guitars evoking bird calls or mimicking the moonlight shimmering on water in a martial, ecstatic crescendo; the latter is a much quieter rhapsody, an elegiac, trembling, desolate blues, also tinged with metaphysical overtones in its majestic pacing. They are acid mini-symphonies that drag on in interminable agonies.

Tom Verlaine, thanks to his piercing, hysterically mechanical guitar style, became the prophet of a revolution in guitar performance, no less influential than Jimi Hendrix a decade earlier. His free improvisations make him somewhat the John Coltrane of the New Wave.

Adventure (Elektra, 1978), leveraging an already classic guitar style, is a much more relaxed record, where the underlying violence has turned into morbid desire rather than visceral scream. The tone, following the epic resignation of Torn Curtain, becomes dreamlike and psychedelic, “Doorsian” (Carried Away), certainly less rough, with hints of an ethereal West Coast sound (Days). The songs maintain a calm, steady, singable middle register (as in Glory), reaching peaks of pathos in Fire, a solemn and sinister metaphysical vision, and in The Dream's Dream, a lyrical instrumental elegy with progressive melodic movement and evocative psychedelic effects. The only exception of brutality is Foxhole, in the best Stooges tradition.

In the funereal atmosphere of Television’s cool-punk, the songs resonate with a Freudian tension, unmistakably marked by Verlaine’s hypnotic and thunderous guitar riff—an intermittent crackle reminiscent of a vain, stammering moonlit rhapsody—and by his singing, tuned to Middle Eastern-like litanies.

After Television disbanded, Tom Verlaine essentially continued their mission with his solo albums.

The Blow-up (1982) collects live recordings of 1978, including 15-minute versions of Little Johnny Jewel (possibly Verlaine's best guitar performance ever) and of Marquee Moon.

Richard Lloyd instead abandoned the manic style that had made him famous to deliver with Alchemy (Elektra, 1979) a collection of transcendent ballads (Misty Eyes, Blue And Gray) and melodic power-rock (In The Night). After six years of detoxification, Lloyd renewed the splendor of his desperate romanticism with the eight-minute raga solo of the title track on Field Of Fire (Moving Target, 1985 – Parasol, 2007), an album that also includes the ballad Black To White, one of his pinnacles, and the poignant Devil Left To Pay.

Television reunited to record Television (Capitol, 1992). The sound—acidic, nervous, alienated, metropolitan—is completely different from that of the latest Tom Verlaine. The symbolism of the lyrics heightens the sense of unease and desolation. Yet, as had already happened with the group’s first two albums, and unlike, for example, Neil Young, the whole possesses a solemn spiritual power, closer to the mystical and transcendent music of the East than to the pagan and worldly music of the West.
This final act of the Television trilogy confirms that the greatness of their art lies in its impotence: the “fatal”-atmosphere blues of Call Mr Lee, the acid-rock of No Glamour For Willi (with a melody and arrangement almost Doors-like), the schizoid nightmare of Mars, the lysergic vortex of Rhyme—these are not songs, they are only fragments of songs, unfinished pieces that cannot be completed.
Often it is the timing, the pacing, or the breaking of conventions that defines a piece’s identity, as in Beauty Trip, a complex weave of honky-tonk, swing, and rhythm and blues. The approach of ballads like Shane, She Wrote This is solemn, with the slow cadences of country, as if those stories conveyed important truths. At the same time, Verlaine’s tone, no longer as aseptic as in the early days, now blends the inspired quality of Morrison, the cynicism of Reed, the theatricality of Bowie, and the sarcasm of Jagger.
Verlaine and Lloyd reach the peak of their artistry: the trembling Lou Reed–style recitation in 1880 or So is counterpointed by one guitar chiming the notes of the theme hypnotically, while the other interjects intermittent, quivering phrases in the style of Jerry Garcia (Grateful Dead).

Richard Lloyd released several solo albums. The Cover Doesn't Matter (Upsetter, 2001) picked up where the New Wave left off and pushed forward with heroic dexterity and metaphysical ecstasy (Downline). Other solo albums include: The Radiant Monkey (2007), The Jamie Neverts Story (2009), Rosedale (2016), The Countdown (2018).