Who Are the ‘Big 4’ of New York City Rock Bands?

For decades, New York City has been attracting creative people from all over the world to it likes moths to a flame.

In New York, perhaps more than any other American city, there is a sense that success — however one might define it — is always just around the corner. With a little bit of patience, passion and elbow grease, anyone can be exactly who they want to be here.

“You know, I should have been born in New York, man,” John Lennon once told Jann Wenner of Rolling Stone — Lennon moved to New York in the summer of 1971. “I should have been born in the Village! That’s where I belong! Why wasn’t I born there? … Everybody heads towards the center, that’s why I’m here now. I’m here just to breathe it. It might be dying, or there might be a lot of dirt in the air, but this is where it’s happening.”

So much groundbreaking music has come out of the Big Apple, across many years, genres and origins, a phenomena that continues today. Below, we’ve somehow narrowed it all down to what we’re considering the “Big 4” of New York City rock acts. To be clear, we’re not judging based solely on commercial success, but on overall impact, influence and importance to the broader musical landscape.

The Velvet Underground

There is frankly nothing more New York than the Velvet Underground, a band made up of three quasi-New Yorkers (Lou Reed, Moe Tucker and Sterling Morrison spent their childhoods on Long Island, but much of their teens and early 20s in the city), an immigrant from Wales (John Cale) who possessed the only technical training and a German singer (Nico) who came into the picture at the behest of the one and only Andy Warhol. Only in New York could an array of these people find one another.

It’s been regurgitated a million times, but Brian Eno truly hit the nail exactly on the head in 1982 when he noted that although the Velvet Underground’s 1967 debut album, The Velvet Underground & Nico, sold only around 30,000 copies in its first few years of existence, “everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band.” Such was the power of the Velvets, with songs that combined elements of just about every style of music one can think of. In the Velvet Underground was the foundation for further experimentations — both by its own members and many others — in punk, art rock and pop.

In many ways, Reed’s songwriting was the darker, grittier, more sexual and sinister version of what Dylan had been doing in the same city. Drag queens, drug dealers and hustlers came to life in the songs, often accompanied by droning, dissonant sounds that stood in direct contrast to much of the melodic music of the ’60s and ’70s. We may not be able to experience this era of New York ourselves, but we can absolutely take a tour via the music of the Velvet Underground.

Kiss

If there is one thing Kiss, a band of native New Yorkers, understood it was this: a large part of rock ‘n’ roll lies in the spectacle of it. There is no business like show business.

Performing as the Starchild (Paul Stanley), the Demon (Gene Simmons), the Spaceman (Ace Frehley) and the Catman (Peter Criss), Kiss was able draw inspiration from glam rock and New York City theater to create not just a band, but an overall experience for their audience that would not soon leave their minds. Their first few albums sold poorly, but what they lacked in traditional commercial success, they more than made up for at their live shows, which often included pyrotechnics and fake blood. Kiss’ diligence with their touring and promotion eventually paid off, with 1975’s Alive! proving to be their breakthrough release. Before too long, Kiss was bringing their fantastical show to fans all around the globe, where people often showed up in their own black-and-white face paint — it was hardly something a group of boys from Queens could have dreamed of.

For all intents and purposes, Kiss didn’t make sense. Four men in heavy makeup, heels and costumes isn’t exactly a “masculine” representation of rock ‘n’ roll. But these were New Yorkers who knew that oftentimes more is more, and standing out in the music industry is crucial to both lasting success and artistic self-empowerment. As Stanley put it to LA Weekly in 2011: “I don’t necessarily want to buy a t-shirt with a guy on it who looks like my neighbor.”

Talking Heads

To describe Talking Heads is to describe something intangible. This is their strength.

When Talking Heads, a band of former art school students, got together in New York City, punk music was becoming all the rage with acts like Television, the Ramones, Suicide, etc. Those bands and many others would find their own lane of success, but Talking Heads were in a category that didn’t quite exist yet. Not everyone felt drawn to the harder rocking, take-no-prisoners attitude of the punk rock bands — there had to be something for the quirkier, more eccentric New Yorkers who still wanted to dance.

READ MORE: Why David Byrne Walked Out on Talking Heads’ Final Concert

Which is precisely where Talking Heads, who found inspiration in world music, R&B and the general NYC art world around them, came into play.

“Other contemporary acts, people around us, some of them were adopting poses or clothes or guitar styles or whatever that seemed to be from a previous era, from a previous generation,” frontman David Byrne explained to NPR in 2023. “And I thought to myself, well, those were invented or created by other people and they belong to them and they express something about their generation. But how do I do something that belongs to us, that speaks to our generation, that speaks to our concerns? And I thought, well then, I have to jettison everything that went before and be very careful not to adopt any of that stuff.”

What Talking Heads expertly did — likely without realizing they were doing it — was take the can-do spirit of punk rock and combine it with a more angular style of music, a sort of skittish energy that sounded like a group of young New Yorkers finding their path and trying new things along the way. In their music, it was cool to be curious about the world and people surrounding you, and perfectly fine to ask yourself how you got there.

“Musically…and visually we felt very, very different than what was then considered punk rock,” Byrne continued to NPR. “But [we had this] this kind of DIY, the do it yourself, idea that was prevalent amongst the punk rockers…and we [could] speak to the concerns of our generation and our contemporaries.”

Billy Joel

It sort of doesn’t get more New York than Billy Joel, the man who has played Madison Square Garden more than anyone else in history. (He’s done it 150 times, for the record.)

One look through his catalog and the album and song titles will speak for themselves: 52nd Street, “New York State of Mind,” “Uptown Girl,” “Big Man on Mulberry Street,” Turnstiles, etc. Though he grew up in Hicksville on Long Island, Joel’s musical life centered around New York, and he was quite purposeful in his mission to become a certain kind of singer-songwriter.

READ MORE: The Best Song From Every Billy Joel Album

“I don’t think the punks are typically representative of the whole spectrum of New York music,” he to The New York Times in 1978, the year he played his very first show at Madison Square Garden. “I wanted to present another point of view, but I didn’t want to be Barry Manilow, either.”

That he did, writing songs about New York that spoke to its grit, promise, spontaneity and reliability. One Reddit user we found put it as succinctly as anyone ever could: “Big flourishes while also being a ham-and-egger personality wise. Dude IS NY.”