Drums and Wires

Drums and Wires is the third studio album by the English rock band XTC, released on 17 August 1979 on Virgin Records. It is a more pop-oriented affair than the band's previous effort, Go 2 (1978), and was named for its emphasis on guitars ("wires") and expansive-sounding drums. The album was their first issued in the United States and their first recorded with guitarist Dave Gregory, who had replaced keyboardist Barry Andrews earlier in 1979. It features a mix of pop, art rock, new wave and punk styles with much rhythmic interplay between XTC's two guitarists.

Rolling Stone's Jon Pareles called the album XTC's "least-dissonant" and identified the band's "current obsession" as "Philip Glass Steve Reich-style static harmony, and their favorite complicated game is to stalemate pop progressions with immobile arrangements." He criticised the group's "Beatles fixation", bemoaning when the band appears "to cop from outside sources", such as the melody of the Beatles' "Please Please Me" in "When You're Near Me I Have Difficulty". Playboy published a single-sentence review: "Devo clones that sound more like the old Maxwell House percolator than like a rock band."