SOOOOO WHO EVEN ARE THESE GUYS. HAHA. I MEAN WHAT

heeey there son. you wanna start listening to talking heads? of course ya do. well like a lot of things you should probably start with what you know, uhh right? assuming you know very little about talking heads, you've probably heard at least 2 of their songs: 1. 'Psycho Killer' from their first album 'Talking Heads: 77', and 2. 'Once in a Lifetime' off their fourth album 'Remain in Light', or at least heard it referenced (and you may find yourself with a beautiful house, and a beautiful wife etc etc).
soooo if i were you i would listen to psycho killer. you can watch it here along with a music video that came out last september (ok why not i guess) starring saoirse ronan. or if you've heard that one before, you can watch my personal favorite rendition of the song, from this 1976 concert at the kitchen. the song starts about six minutes in.
pretty cool, huh? yeah? i thought so anyways. this minimalistic no-wave-y sound is pretty exclusive to th:77 (it's very early Cars methinks), but it runs throughout the whole thing. talking heads had some pretty major style shifts. maybe now's an appropriate time to ask the question: what genre are they (really)?
most people would say new wave. some people say rock. some people say art punk, post-punk or art rock. one thing's for certain - they were a big band for the emerging 'new wave' movement in the mid-to-late 70s, being in the new york punk scene and putting out one of new wave's first radio hits (psycho killer). you could say that new wave was invented to describe bands like talking heads, saying 'punk' without the negative connotations audiences had with that label. i personally am not a huge fan of the term new wave, as it was really purely a marketing thing, but i'd also say it is an accurate descriptor. new wave grew into itself, after all. but if the new wave sound was defined by stuff like th:77, then they had surely entered new territory post-1983. 'art-rock' and 'art-punk' were definitely derogatory terms at the time, but i think they've shaken that off and you could definitely say talking heads is either one, as they were an art school band.
rock seems a little small-picture...by the late 80s they were definitely doing some rock stuff but overall 'rock' is not giving you an accurate impression of the music. so really, you'd have to divy it up by album. 'th:77' and 'more songs' are pretty new wave, 'fear of music', 'remain in light' and 'speaking in tongues' get a little weirder along with more funk and afrobeat influences so that's pretty solidly art-punk, and 'little creatures', 'true stories' and 'naked' you could say are rock or art-pop. true stories obviously had some tex-mex influence along with it being a musical album sorta so some definite variability there. or, of course, you could just go with the catch-all 'alternative'.