Tracks....
You can sort of go from the mid 1970s stuff of, I dunno, Beach Boys-ELO-10CC-Chris Rainbow and then do a dramatic gear shift to the pre indie cool of Human League/Heaven 17/OMD/Numan(?). All the latter partially emanate from Kraftwerk and then they run into the poppy stuff of N Kershaw, Buggles, Frankie, T Horn etc.
The Chris Rainbow bit would at the changing point - 1979-1981- have gone into the Alan Parsons and Jon Anderson etc direction - the sophisticated end of older earlier 1970s artists some eight or nine years on. Witness also Roxy Music's "Avalon" and, I guess, even Stevie Wonder's "The Secret Life of Plants" (C.1980).
BUT this was the great missing POP album of the first years of the 1980s and it joins the two strands up.
New Musik - Anywhere
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLN69eaUA_g8ybrUZgL5TNr7_ec_1hqkLr
(In my humble opinion)
Other ramblings: I like the way "Churches" on that album name checks The Clash's "Four Horsemen". I don't know whether it was deliberate but there is just a year or so between the two tracks and their musical literacy was underestimated. I think XTC were also a "bridge" band between the old and the new, albeit in a rock indie and critically acclaimed sense, but check out this to have assumptions about them challenged:
XTC - The Somnambulist - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqLuO_cPjco
So where did it all lead apart from Cher's "Believe" and chronic wall to wall auto-tune I hear you ask. Well, the answer is pretty obvious. First, three works of true proper art in sound in the later 1980s where moody atmospherics knocked out the summery harmonies to exquisite effect and a moment in the 1990s when that summer returned in all its glory. Oh and inevitably to "Paranoid Android" if you are so minded (which I'm not):
The Blue Nile - Heatwave - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeQhK79YkEo
Talk Talk - Life's What You Make it - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9G42rmPvbbU
Talk Talk - Eden - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FR45WPnM3qU
The High Llamas - Checking In Checking Out - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ats3sUKmkjw