“I loved The Velvet Underground and the Carpenters,” Ric Ocasek told an interviewer in 2011. The Cars singer invoked those two groups to describe a dichotomy in the music of The Cars, which brought together alt-rock guitar and appealing pop hooks. Ocasek’s musical tastes would inform not just his songwriting, but also his producing career, as he’d spend the early 1980s producing outsider acts like the D.C. hardcore band Bad Brains, and Suicide, a confrontational New York duo that wrang terror out of electronic music, and stood no chance of ever getting mainstream radio play. Suicide’s influence is moderately evident on 1980’s Panorama, The Cars’ frosty third album—though the resulting album is closer to early synth-pop European acts like Ultravox, Gary Numan, and Be Bop Deluxe. The opening title track announces Panorama’s harsh intentions by using irregular rhythms, via a jarring shift from 4/4 time to 9/8, and a delay effect in the chorus that makes Ocasek sound robotic. The verses to “Touch and Go,” meanwhile, have a woozy, almost seasick feel, because the bass and drums are in 5/4 time, while the rest of the band is in standard 4/4, which creates an imbalanced feeling. And except for parts of “Misfit Kid,” the band’s trademark stacked harmonies—a trick they learned from producer Roy Thomas Baker—are mostly absent. That puts more focus on Ocasek’s tense vocals, which are deadpan in the style of a film noir hero. And his lyrics move from mysterious to unknowable, including references to “pastel pinned-up sails” in “Gimme Some Slack,” surely the only rock song to ever mention Euripides and Federico Fellini. Throughout Panorama, guitarist Elliot Easton has a normalizing effect, thanks to his hard-rock licks in “Gimme Some Slack” and his sterling solo in “Touch and Go,” the only successful single on the album (Easton is one of rock’s most underrated guitarists, likely because he favors tone and melody above speed and dexterity). And “Down Boys,” sung by smooth-voiced bassist Ben Orr, is as strong as anything on the band’s previous record, the hook-packed Candy-O. To some fans, Panorama is the great overlooked Cars album, and it certainly anticipates, decades later, the arrival of electroclash music. But it’s an acquired taste. Maybe Ocasek sums up the album’s intent in his lyrics to “Misfit Kid”: “I live with absurdity/It’s always warm and runny.”