Discipline

Fripp recruited Bruford on drums, the American singer and guitarist Adrian Belew, who had been in Frank Zappa's and David Bowie's backing bands and toured with Talking Heads, and the American bassist Tony Levin, who got the job after playing a single chorus of Red at the auditions. They first called themselves Discipline and played their first show at Moles Club in Bath on 30 April 1981. By October they had chosen the name King Crimson. The album was made in London with producer Rhett Davies, who had worked with Belew on Remain in Light by Talking Heads and with Fripp on Brian Eno's Another Green World and Before and After Science.

Fripp wanted a "rock gamelan". He played complex picked arpeggios, Belew supplied guitar sounds that often mimic animal noises, Levin used the Chapman Stick, and Bruford played Simmons electronic drums and largely avoided cymbals. In Frame by Frame, Belew loops a melody while Fripp phases it. The lyrics of Indiscipline were adapted from a letter written to Belew about a painting. Thela Hun Ginjeet is an anagram of "heat in the jungle", and its spoken section is a recording of Belew describing being harassed near Notting Hill Gate. The Sheltering Sky takes its name from the 1949 novel by Paul Bowles.

E.G. Records released it in September 1981, and Warner Bros. followed in the United States. It reached 41 in Britain and 45 in the United States. Rolling Stone's John Piccarella praised the band's talent and the "visionary approach to guitar playing" of Belew and Fripp. Christgau called it "the Heads meet the League of Gentlemen". Greg Prato wrote that "the pairing of these two originals worked out magically". Pitchfork ranked it 56 on its 2002 list of the top 100 albums of the 1980s, and Pitchfork's Sodomsky noted that Elephant Talk lists synonyms for conversation letter by letter.