Tentative Decisions: Demos & Live pulls back the curtain on Talking Heads’ earliest days, capturing the moment when David Byrne, Chris Frantz, and Tina Weymouth went from art-school experimenters to one of the most original bands to come out of New York in the mid-’70s.

This 3CD set expands on last year’s RSD Black Friday release with 15 previously unreleased demos recorded at CBS Studios in September 1975, along with more than a dozen live recordings from 1976 and 1977. What you hear is the band finding its footing in real time. The nervous tension, the clipped rhythms, the dry humor. Songs that would anchor their first two albums, including “Don’t Worry About The Government,” “The Book I Read,” “Thank You For Sending Me An Angel,” and “Stay Hungry,” are presented in early forms that feel lean, direct, and unguarded.

The story begins even earlier. After relocating from Rhode Island to New York in 1975, Byrne, Frantz, and Weymouth recorded demos with their late friend J.R. Rost simply to understand what they sounded like as a trio. Those recordings open the collection. By the fall of that year, at the request of Columbia's Mark Spector, they cut a full album’s worth of demos at CBS. No contract followed, but the session preserved the blueprint.

The live material adds another layer. A performance at Max’s Kansas City in October 1976 captures the band just weeks before meeting Seymour Stein and signing to Sire. A January 1977 show at the Jabberwocky Club in Syracuse documents one of the final performances by the original trio before Jerry Harrison joined that March. You can hear the momentum building.

The set also reaches back to the Artistics, the pre-Talking Heads group Byrne and Frantz formed at the Rhode Island School of Design. Recorded in 1974 at Frantz’s apartment in Providence, those tapes include the earliest known versions of “Psycho Killer” and “Warning Sign.” As Frantz recalls in the liner notes, the shift from covering the Kinks, Motown, and Al Green to writing original material began when Byrne walked into a shared studio space and played the first verse and chorus of “Psycho Killer.” Weymouth added French lyrics for the bridge. Frantz filled in verses. The foundation was laid.

Also available is a black vinyl edition, featuring 10 early demos and a 1976 live recording from the Ocean Club, plus a 7-inch single of the Artistics’ 1974 recordings of “Psycho Killer” and “Warning Sign.”

As Talking Heads mark their 50th anniversary, Tentative Decisions: Demos & Live documents the fragile, formative stretch before the acclaim, before the suits, before the expanded lineup. It’s the sound of a band sketching its identity in small rooms and local clubs, long before the rest of the world caught up.