Debbie Harry and Chris Stein look back on Blondie’s Blondie.

For those who came of age listening to Top 40 radio in the late 1970s, the sounds of Blondie offered a unique glimpse into New York’s glamorous underground during one of its most artistically prolific eras. Classic tracks like “Rapture”, “Heart of Glass” and “Call Me” were potpourri of glam, punk, power pop, disco, rap and experimental noise that sounded unlike anything that had come before. Due to the group’s fluid musicianship, visual reinvention and exceptional frontwoman in singer Debbie Harry, Blondie proved to be the most successful New York-based group of the decade – and rivaled only by The Velvet Underground and Suicide as the most influential of any era .

The new 10-disc box set Blondie: Against the Odds 1974-1982 presents the most comprehensive account yet of the band’s classic releases and makes a compelling case for Blondie’s premiership status. Among the many demos, samples and remixes from blonde (1976), Plastic letters (1977), Parallel lines (1978), Eat in rhythm (1979), American car (1980) and The hunter (1982) are also early, unreleased recordings (including a garage-rock incarnation of “Heart of Glass” called “The Disco Song”) and a series of home tapes and synth mixes. Presented in its entirety, the box set chronicles the warp speed at which Blondie transformed from fledgling punk band to global phenomenon.

“[Blondie] it wasn’t really firmly established,” Harry explains over the phone about the early years of the band’s management. “We had a lot of changes in the lineup. We were always changing and still discovering who we were.”

Still, the vast collection—with its accompanying liner notes, interviews, detailed chronology and discography, and hundreds of photos—suggests a band that was, from the start, more than a messed-up garage band spun out of CBGBs. Harry and guitarist Chris Stein began playing Hilly Kristal’s infamous Bowery club in the spring of 1974 as the Stilettos (later the Stilletto Fads), a cabaret-inspired group founded by Elda Gentile, a singer and actress at the experimental theater La MaMa. with the help of Off-Off Broadway director Tony Ingrassia. By that fall, Harry and Stein had left to form the more musically focused Blondie, which for a time opened for the likes of the Ramones and Television. “[Those bands] came fully formed,” Harry says. “And it was a lot easier to figure out who they were.”