The resulting music is largely hook-driven with complex instrumental parts (particularly on longer tracks such as "Marquee Moon"), while evoking themes of adolescence, discovery, and transcendence through imagery in urban, pastoral, and nocturnal modes, including references to the geography of Lower Manhattan.

Influenced by Bohemian and French poetry, Verlaine's lyrics also feature puns and double entendres intended to give the songs an impressionistic quality in describing his perception of an experience.

[1] That same year, Television shared a residency at CBGB with singer and poet Patti Smith, who had recommended the band to Arista Records president Clive Davis.

[5] Verlaine, who did not want to be guided in the studio by a famous producer, enlisted engineer Andy Johns based on his work for the Rolling Stones' 1973 album Goats Head Soup.

[17] Both sides of the album begin with three shorter, hook-driven songs, which Stylus Magazine's Evan Chakroff said veer between progressive rock and post-punk styles.

"[19] According to Stephen Thomas Erlewine, the album is "comprised entirely of tense garage rockers that spiral into heady intellectual territory, which is achieved through the group's long, interweaving instrumental sections".

[29] The lyrics also incorporate maritime imagery, including the paradoxical "nice little boat made out of ocean" in "See No Evil", the waterfront setting in "Elevation", sea metaphors in "Guiding Light", and references to docks, caves, and waves in "Prove It".

[31] Its vignette-like lyrics follow an ostensibly drug-induced, revelatory experience: "You know it's all like some new kind of drug / my senses are sharp and my hands are like gloves / Broadway looks so medieval, it seems to flap like little pages / I fell sideways laughing, with a friend from many stages.

"[32] According to Waterman, while psychedelic trips informed the experiences of many artists in Lower Manhattan at the time, "Venus" contributed to the impression of Marquee Moon as a transcendental work in the vein of 19th-century Romanticism.

"[31] Christgau said that lyrics such as the reference to Broadway in "Venus" lent the album its association among critics to the East Village, as it "situates this philosophical action in the downtown night".

[16] What I love most about the lyrics of Marquee Moon is their evocation of that youthful moment when you're this close to figuring everything out, voicing in very few words a multivalence worthy of that adventure's complexity and confusion—beautifully, profoundly, naively, contradictorily, romantically, kinetically, jokily, cockily, fearfully, drunkenly, goofily, impudently—so nervous and excited you could fly, or is it faint?

[25] Marquee Moon's title was interpreted by Waterman as an encapsulation of the urban and bucolic imagery in the songs, "suggesting the kind of night sky only visible above the neon glare of city-dwellers' assault on the dark".

[41] While holidaying in London after Marquee Moon's completion, Verlaine saw that Television had been put on NME's front cover and notified Elektra's press department, who encouraged the band to capitalize on their success there with a tour of the UK.

"[1] In NME, Kent wrote that Television have proven to be ambitious and skilled enough to achieve "new dimensions of sonic overdrive" with an "inspired work of pure genius, a record finely in tune and sublimely arranged with a whole new slant on dynamics".

[48] In Audio, Jon Tiven wrote that although the vocals and production could be more amplified, Verlaine's lyrics and guitar "manage to viscerally and intellectually grab the listener".

[49] Joan Downs from Time felt the band's sound is distinguished more by the bold playing of Lloyd, who she said has the potential to become a major figure in rock guitar.

[50] Christgau, in The Village Voice, claimed Verlaine's "demotic-philosophical" lyrics could sustain the album alone, as could the guitar playing, which he said is as penetrating and expressive as Eric Clapton or Jerry Garcia "but totally unlike either".

[45] Tom Hull, his colleague at the Voice, recalls being in Christgau's apartment when he received an advance copy and witnessing his "instantly rapturous" reaction to the album.

In Rolling Stone, Ken Tucker said the lyrics generally amount to non sequiturs, meaningless phrases, and pretentious aphorisms, but are ultimately secondary to the music.

Although he found Verlaine's solos potentially formless and boring, Tucker credited him for structuring his songs around chilling riffs and "a new commercial impulse that gives his music its catchy, if slashing, hook".

[53] Noel Coppage from Stereo Review was more critical of the singing and songwriting, likening Marquee Moon to a stale version of Bruce Springsteen.

[55] At the end of 1977, Marquee Moon was voted the third-best album of the year in the Pazz & Jop, an annual poll of American critics nationwide, published in The Village Voice.

[67] According to English writer Clinton Heylin, Marquee Moon marked the end of the New York scene's peak period, while Spin said it was the CBGB era's "best and most enduring record" and ranked it as the sixth-greatest album of all time in its April 1989 issue.

[72] On September 23, 2003, the album was reissued by Rhino Entertainment with several bonus tracks, including the first CD appearance of Television's 1975 debut single "Little Johnny Jewel (Parts 1 & 2)".

[77] It heavily influenced the indie rock movement of the 1980s, while post-punk acts appropriated the album's uncluttered production, introspective tone, and meticulously performed instrumentation.

[78] Hunter Felt from PopMatters attributed Marquee Moon's influence on post-punk and new wave acts to the precisely syncopated rhythm section of Fred Smith and Billy Ficca.

He recommended 2003's "definitive" reissue of the album to listeners of garage rock revival bands, who he said had modeled themselves after Verlaine's Romantic poetry-inspired lyrics and the "jaded yet somehow impassioned cynicism" of his vocals.

[79] Erlewine, writing for AllMusic, believed the record was innovative for abandoning previous New York punk albums' swing and groove sensibilities in favor of an intellectually stimulating scope that Television achieved instrumentally rather than lyrically.

[20] Fletcher argued that the songs' lack of compression, groove, and extra effects provided "a blueprint for a form of chromatic, rather than rhythmic, music that would later come to be called angular".

[80] According to Greg Kot from the Chicago Tribune, Television "created a new template for guitar rock" because of how Verlaine's improvised playing was woven together with Lloyd's precisely notated solos, particularly on the title track.