What it is, what to hear first, and what sits next to it.
New wave is today a quite broad umbrella term describing popular music from around 1977 to 1986. But originally it was a slim sub genre of Western popular music that arose in the United Kingdom about 1977-78. It had close ties to punk rock and fairly strong influences of the musical style that had been invented and continuously developed throughout the 1970s: reggae. The term new wave was first a kind of description of a more musical and lyric wise complex music than punk. .