Album: Permanent Waves
Year: 1980
. . .
While one might assume that calling your album Permanent Waves might be a dig at what folks called “new wave” music, Rush would spend much of the 1980s making records that were their spin on new wave as surely as their earlier records were their spins on metal and prog.
That said, very few new wave bands — the Police, yeah, X possibly, Hüsker Dü or the Minutemen probably — had the chops to mix all of the different time signatures that Rush crammed into a song like “Freewill,” which, on Permanent Waves, spins out from “The Spirit of Radio” with a cool Alex Lifeson opening that lands into the main guitar riff for the song.