Marquee Moon is the debut album by American rock band Television. It was released on February 8, 1977, by Elektra Records.
For Marquee Moon, Verlaine and fellow guitarist Richard Lloyd abandoned contemporary punk rock's power chords in favor of rock and jazz-inspired interplay, melodic lines, and counter-melodies.
The resulting music is largely hook-driven with complex instrumental parts (particularly on longer tracks such as "Marquee Moon"), while evoking themes of adolescence, discovery, and transcendence through imagery in urban, pastoral, and nocturnal modes, including references to the geography of Lower Manhattan.
Marquee Moon was met with widespread acclaim and was hailed by critics as an original musical development in rock music.
The critical recognition helped the album achieve unexpected commercial success in the United Kingdom, despite poor sales in the United States. Among the most acclaimed music releases in history, it has consistently featured in professionally curated lists of top albums, including Rolling Stone magazine's "500 Greatest Albums of All Time" (2003), on which it ranked 128th. Marquee Moon also proved to be a foundational record of alternative rock, as Television's innovative post-punk instrumentation for the album strongly influenced the new wave and indie rock movements of the 1980s and rock guitar playing in general.
