10 Rock Music Acts Who Peaked With Their First Album

Television are such an important band in the history of rock music, yet they're a band whose time in the sun was so fleeting and so brief that more casual rock bands may have completely missed them.

With their 1977 Marquee Moon debut, this New York outfit took the attention away from simple power chords, shrieking vocals and the other familiar, tired tropes of rock, and instead Television introduced more leftfield - for the time, at least - elements to the traditional rock sound of their predecessors.

From Tom Verlaine, Richard Lloyd, Fred Smith and Billy Ficca, Marquee Moon took the fundamentals of rock and introduced slide guitar, sprinklings of jazz and a smidge of punk bite. Reiterating how Television weren't afraid to take a chance on something different, there's also the album-closing Torn Curtain that is an operatic, experimental, almost cinematic experience.

Clocking in at a brisk, engaging 45 minutes, this is a masterpiece that still holds up majestically to this very day, a whole 45 years since its release. See No Evil is a perfect opening track, the titular Marquee Moon is an 11-minute work of art, and Prove It mesmerises with its guitar hooks.

The great shame when it comes to Television, of course, is that they would break up just one year and one album after Marquee Moon. Another self-titled studio album would follow in 1992 after the band got back together, but that couldn't capture the brilliance of the group's flawless 1977 debut.