Wire is a art-punk band from Britain. You'll note they made the wondrous Pink Flag, a defining record of '77, a defining record in all of rock 'n' roll. It blasted super-short songs, some aggressive, others a new formula of what pop songs could deliver.

A critic's band seemingly uninterested on what N.M.E., or press in general, thought of their locomotive path. They fused Thatcher's England and art-school smarts, and they made more albums, each more haunting and experimental, while learning their way around a studio, engineering songs well ahead of their time.

Collin Newman is the de facto leader who also released solo albums worth owning. Forty years later the group is still regarded as a muscular machine able to challenge listeners— periods of output of pure noise with melody mixed with electronic shards of deconstructed pop, and lyrics most always for the listener to figure out.

For me, Wire's a journal I write my most curious thoughts in. Nothing is algebra, I can reread them and find the cerebral mirror of these musical notepads spinning on a turn table. Wire have now slipped into a method of quick recordings, basically live, with studio tricks inserted after the initial material is down. In a world of plastic music that leaves precious little to enjoy with repeated listenings, this U.K. quartet create incomparable earworms that crawl so slowly into your psyche.

So today, after seven listens of Wire's new single "Short Elevated Period," I was inside that place they take you to. The words: My reasons for living were under review/A parting of the ways, what had it come to?/Standing in the road, where would I go to?/In a short elevated period/In a short elevated period/In a short elevated period. The snare drum so tense, loud, under its grip fuzzy guitars and keyboards of some kind.

Wire's latest album, Silver/Lead, will hit at the end of March. Say what you will, but this band looks forward in a world so scary, one can't help but daydream of the past and reap nostalgia's reward. it's where nothing can hurt you, nothing can stand in your way. They know that. Wire may be here to keep us hearing the tomorrows, playing it dangerous with a frayed safety net just 180 seconds of a new world, which makes a single song a challenge. To compete with the warm misfires of memory. Listen till you take a new way home this afternoon. Long, short or plain wrong we gotta stay up for the last act of the play.