Talking Heads continue their 50th anniversary celebrations with ‘Tentative Decisions: Demos & Live’, a 3CD deluxe set packed with unreleased early demos and live recordings. offers an unprecedented look at Talking Heads’ earliest years. the 3CD collection charts the rapid evolution of the original trio—David Byrne, Chris Frantz, and Tina Weymouth—through a trove of newly unearthed demos and live recordings. The set also includes 10 early demos and a live track recorded at the Ocean Club in 1976.
The earliest recordings on “Tentative Decisions” reach back to The Artistics, the band Frantz and Byrne formed while they were students at the Rhode Island School of Design. Recorded in 1974 at Frantz’s apartment on Benefit Street in Providence, the demo represents the bands earliest known recordings
In the liner notes, Frantz says The Artistics’ aspiration to become the RISD house band—entertaining friends with covers of The Kinks, Motown, and Al Green—changed when they began writing their own songs. “One day, David knocked on the door of the painting studio Tina and I shared,” Frantz recalls. “He played us the first verse and chorus of ‘Psycho Killer,’ which sounded promising.” Byrne asked Weymouth, who spoke French, to write lyrics for the bridge while Frantz added some verses—and so it began.
Talking Heads helped shape modern new wave music and expand the creative possibilities of the music video—most recently with the premiere of a new “Psycho Killer” video directed by Mike Mills and starring Saoirse Ronan.
This release follows the last year’s Black Friday RSD vinyl release of “Tentative Decisions” which effectively offered CD 1 of the new deluxe on clear vinyl. That same vinyl edition is now available to full retail on black vinyl, accompanied with the same seven-inch single (with A and B-sides of ‘Psycho Killer’ and ‘Warning Sign’). The set builds on last year’s 11-song collection adding 15 unreleased demos made for CBS in September 1975, and more than a dozen unreleased live recordings from the band’s first two years in New York.
CD 2 offers more demos, this time 15 Columbia/CBS demos from September 1975, all of which are previously unreleased.
The disc offers 17 live cuts from 1976 and 1977, from three different gigs. The October 1976 performance at Max’s Kansas City took place just a few weeks before the group met with Seymour Stein and signed to Sire Records. The January 1977 show at The Jabberwocky Club in Syracuse was shortly before Jerry Harrison joined.
“Tentative Decisions: Demos & Live” will be released in March 2026, via Rhino/Sire Records
The Fat Angel Sings 