There are few institutions in music — save for maybe the hip-hop debut — as celebrated as a punk band’s debut album. The Clash, the Damned, and the Ramones — to name a few noteworthy members of the club — each pretty much got it perfect the first time around, which is both a great way to kick off your career, and an incredibly difficult thing to live up to. And each band did eventually surpass that debut album on their third try: the Clash with London Calling, the Damned with Machine Gun Etiquette, and the Ramones with Rocket To Russia. For Wire, however, it only took 15 songs and 10 months to make the journey from their debut album to their highest peak, Chairs Missing.

To listen to Pink Flag and Chairs Missing back to back, it seems remarkable that these albums were even made by the same band. Chairs Missing still has the unmistakable voice of Colin Newman, and the same arty, expressionist approach to songwriting that adamantly avoided conventional pop structures (though there are a few more recognizable choruses here). But instrumentally and atmospherically, this is a big step into an entirely new territory.

On Chairs Missing, Wire push themselves a lot farther into the avant garde than they had before. Certainly, Pink Flag is about as strange as a punk album can get without stepping out of the punk aesthetic, but Chairs Missing is an art-rock album played two minutes at a time, at 160 BPMs. A few of the tracks sound like the Wire of old: the stomping “From the Nursery,” the bright and jittery “Sand In My Joints,” and the hard-rocking closing number, “Too Late.” But the real beauty of Chairs Missing is hearing what happens when Wire dials up the weirdness, and that weirdness is really something to behold.

Opening track “Practice Makes Perfect” is just as dark and menacing as Pink Flag’s “Reuters,” but vastly scarier. It escalates a spiral staircase of a bassline up toward some shards of horror-soundtrack guitar, as Newman delivers an increasingly creepy narrative that reaches its chilling climax when he says, “Up in my bedroom/ I’ve got Sarah Bernhardt’s hand.” The band incorporates some dizzyingly uptempo synth leads on “Another the Letter,” builds up a tempestuous head of steam on the intense, six-minute “Mercy,” and showcases their more ambient, dirge-heavy side on the hushed and melancholy “Marooned” and the itchy, psychedelic “Used To.” 

And yet again, Chairs Missing — much like 154 — balances out some of the band’s weirder textural experiments with a pair of tracks that showcase their melodic prowess. And they’re both about bugs. The title of “Outdoor Miner” refers to the serpentine miner — a type of inchworm — and its sing-songy chorus of “He lies on his side/ Is he trying to hide?/ In fact it’s the earth that he’s known since birth” puts a weirdly affectionate spotlight on a creature that would otherwise go unnoticed. It’s also, I should note, one of the prettiest songs in the band’s repertoire. By contrast, “I Am The Fly” is a clap-along post-punk single that’s more in the punk spirit than anything else here, Newman repeating the phrase “I am the fly in the ointment” as the song carries out on an abrasive, albeit unshakable groove. 

The title of Chairs Missing, it should be noted, is an English slang term for being mentally imbalanced — for instance: “That guy’s got a few chairs missing in his parlor.” It’s fitting for an album that so frequently dabbles in the unsettling and the disorienting. And on a first listen, it might all sound a bit off. But listen closer — every track is so intricately crafted, and every piece seems to lock into place perfectly. Wire knew exactly what they were doing.