"It showed me what music can do." Eight surprising artists you never knew were inspired by the brilliance of Talking Heads' Remain In Light

It was 45 years ago this week that Talking Heads that released their fourth album Remain In Light, and you could say the world hasn’t been quite the same since. A shape-shifting record built on grooves inside grooves inside grooves, melding Afrobeat rhythms with tightly-wound funk, choppy guitars and David Byrne’s expressionist melodicism, Remain In Light must have sounded like it was from another planet when it arrived in 1980. Mainly because it still sounds like it’s from another planet now, in 2025.

Over the years, it has become more than just a landmark record for the art-rock trailblazers from New York, one of those rare albums that has seeped down through the generations, its influence springing up in random places. Remain In Light has sleeper cells right across the musical spectrum: you’ll find famous fans who swear by its brilliance plying their wares in genres as varied as mainstream pop, leftfield indie, electro, industrial and hard-rock. Of course, all of those things pale in comparison to the fact that it also had one of its songs covered by Kermit The Frog, the ultimate seal of approval:

Here's seven acts whose work has come under the spell of Remain In Light’s brilliance...

Radiohead

Well, the obvious one. As teenagers who formed at school and called themselves On A Friday (because they rehearsed on… well, you get it), Thom Yorke & co. were after a new name when they signed to Parlophone and were told their feeble moniker didn’t quite cut it. They looked to Talking Heads for inspiration – Radio Head is a song on the 1986 Talking Heads album True Stories. As Jonny Greenwood revealed in a podcast interview with Adam Buxton in 2016, Radiohead listened to Remain In Light on repeat as they made Kid A, the use of organic samples and repetitive grooves also a blueprint of sorts for Radiohead’s 2012 album The King Of Limbs.

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LCD Soundsystem

Across their career, the music made by James Murphy’s dance-punk collective has often sounded like a more rave-y take on the locked-in rhythms of Remain In Light. Like Talking Heads, LCD make a very New York-y, ‘can’t stop to chat, got too much to do’ sort of sound, their music infused with the urgent, infectious buzz of the city. When Murphy & co. nod to Fela Kuti-style beats, it always feels like they’re doing so through a Remain In Light prism.

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Vampire Weekend

Whilst their rhythm section is a little more loose-limbed and free-spirited than anything on Remain In Light, you can definitely hear its influence on the guitars, all clean tones and Afropop-tinged patterns. Frontman Ezra Koenig has a similar sort of charisma to David Byrne too, pulling you in but never letting you too close.

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Franz Ferdinand

Scottish indie crew Franz Ferdinand evoke the more playful side of Remain In Light – the criss-crossing guitars, dreamy glam vocals and percussive rush of second song Crosseyed And Painless was very much the formula that underpinned FF’s breakthrough records.

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Nine Inch Nails

You might not hear the influence of Remain In Light directly in Nine Inch Nails but it’s an album that has deeply informed Trent Reznor’s approach to making music. “The record enlightened and changed me,” Reznor said of the album “It showed me what music can do, how song structures can look like, or how drum parts can interact with other parts. Since I started making music myself, this wonderful album has been something I can always consult. The great thing is that the record can still be approached from so many different directions without losing its puzzles.”

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Paramore

Paramore channelled the new wave funk swagger of Remain In Light on their 2017 record After Laughter. Hayley Williams told Blackbird Spyplane she was almost exclusively listening to Talking Heads and B-52s during the making of the album, revealing that she bought two Talking Heads T-shirts at the time, a Remain In Light one and a True Stories top, the latter setting her back a hefty $1000. Williams appeared as a guest vocalist on David Byrne’s recent solo album Who Is The Sky?.

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St. Vincent

A natural heir to Talking Heads in the way that she blends accessible, mainstream music with an experimental bent, the deft layering and subtly shifting dynamics of St Vincent’s best songs are pure Remain In Light - check out the title track of Masseduction for evidence of that. The Texan, aka Annie Clark, made Love This Giant, a collaborative record with Byrne, back in 2012.

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The 1975

Matty Healy paid tribute to Talking Heads whilst wearing an over-sized suit in the video for The 1975 single It’s Not Living (If It’s Not With You) and the chiming, compressed funk guitars of Remain In Light have been paid tribute to in many a 1975 song (Love Me sounds like a Talking Heads song if they were the cockiest kids in high school). The alt-pop giants’ marching state-of-the-nation address Love It If We Made It even comes across like a more antsy update of Once In A Lifetime, as if the Talking Heads classic has been airdropped into an apocalypse.