No wave was a short-lived avant-garde music and art scene that emerged in the late 1970s in downtown New York City.[1][4] Reacting against punk rock's recycling of rock and roll clichés, no wave musicians instead experimented with noise, dissonance and atonality in addition to a variety of non-rock genres while often reflecting an abrasive, confrontational, and nihilistic worldview.[5][6][7]