A black silhouette stands against a New York wall sprayed with the words “Modern Clix.” The man in the photograph is Charly García, the Argentine musician whose second solo studio album, Clics modernos, arrived on November 5, 1983, five days after Argentina’s first presidential election following the return to civilian rule. The cover, shot by Uberto Saramazo in Tribeca, captured a record that sounded nothing like the rock García had made before.
A New York escape and a failed session
Why did he need that distance? García had moved to New York at the start of 1983 to get away from Buenos Aires, which he said was suffocating him. He settled into a loft in Greenwich Village and began recording at Electric Lady Studios with co-producer Joe Blaney. The plan was to make an album with a session drummer, but after one failed day in the studio, García and bassist Pedro Aznar, his former Serú Girán bandmate who happened to be in New York, scrapped that idea entirely.
Instead of live drums, García programmed a Roland TR-808 drum machine for “Nos Siguen Pegando Abajo,” and that rhythmic approach became the foundation for the rest of the songs. Aznar played fretless bass on every track except “Nuevos Trapos.” Session drummer Casey Scheuerell still added acoustic and electronic Simmons drums on a few tracks, and session guitarist Larry Carlton, whose credits include Steely Dan and Joni Mitchell, added guitar to three songs.
Drum machines, samplers and new wave
The technology was deliberately new. García used an E-mu Emulator sampler, a Roland Jupiter-6 synthesizer, and the TR-808, moving from traditional rock instrumentation toward new wave with synthesizers and samples. In “No Me Dejan Salir,” he sampled a vocal shout by James Brown from “Hot Pants,” an early example of sampling in Spanish-language rock. All nine tracks were written by García, and two became singles: “No Me Dejan Salir” and “Nos Siguen Pegando Abajo.”
The lyrics kept a political edge, but delivered it through sardonic, allegorical humor. “Los Dinosaurios” presents dinosaurs as the only creatures immune to extinction, a line widely read as a reference to the thousands who disappeared under the dictatorship. It was one of García’s favorite compositions. García later said the feeling of alienation from that period fed directly into “Demoliendo Hoteles,” which opens his next album, Piano Bar.
Chart lists and Luna Park shows
The record’s reputation grew steadily. Rolling Stone Argentina named Clics modernos the best album by García in 2008, and it placed second on the magazine’s list of the 100 greatest national rock albums in both 2007 and 2013. The American edition of Rolling Stone put it at number nine on its list of the 50 best Latin American rock albums in 2023. In 2024 it ranked sixth in the Los 600 de Latinoamérica list. The album’s early live presentations also helped cement its place. García introduced it at Buenos Aires’s Luna Park Stadium from December 15 to 18, 1983, with a band that included keyboardist Fito Páez and backing vocalist Fabiana Cantilo. Pelo magazine called those shows “captivating” and counted them among the year’s best.
The cover location became part of the album’s story. The mural by New York street artist Richard Hambleton in Tribeca carried the stenciled words “Modern Clix,” the English version of the title. In 2023, to mark the album’s 40th anniversary, the corner of Walker Street and Cortlandt Alley where the photo was taken was renamed “Charly García Corner.” The 1984 tour that followed reached Chile, Uruguay, and Peru, and later accounts describe friction between García and parts of the audience that had not accepted his new sound. That resistance did not slow the album’s momentum.
Then, at the start of 2026, more than four decades after its release, Clics modernos climbed back to the top of Argentina’s weekly national album sales chart, as reported by CAPIF. A record born from one failed studio day in New York had outlasted the dictatorship it defied, the audience that resisted its new sound, and every expectation placed on it.