Sonic Youth - An Alternative Nation

Sonic Youth (guitarists and vocalists Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo, drummer Steve Shelley and bassist/vocalist Kim Gordon) have been the band that, more than any other, shaped the development of American alternative rock as we know it today, establishing themselves as the quintessential alternative rock outfit even in terms of image, eventually attaining, alongside mainstream media recognition, a kind of star status within the alternative imagination. Grunge, noise-rock, post-hardcore and much of 90s indie-rock owe their very existence, above all, to the work of Sonic Youth, who acted as catalysts in the process by which the post-punk generation of musicians assimilated the expressive languages of rock and avant-garde music.

Their revolutionary impact unfolds along three axes: the first, already mentioned, is the synthesis of distant, sometimes antithetical, genres and sounds. The music of the four New Yorkers (five from 2000 onward) is in fact a "total" guitar-driven rock, a kind of indefinable monstrum that crosses the syntax of garage-rock, punk, no-wave and hardcore, applying them now to the trance of psychedelic rock, now to the gentlest guitar pop, now to free-form textures or to hard rock. Intellectuals, yet deeply versed in rock and passionate about pop culture, Sonic Youth introduced the Grateful Dead to the iconoclastic world of hardcore and small independent labels, absorbing thirty years of pop music suggestions into a sonic mass that could be furious, nihilistic, dreamy, delicate, heavy, disturbing, frightening and sensual, sometimes all at once. They've been labeled "noise-rock" for the abundance of noise in their compositions, but plenty of other definitions would fit just as well (while still being reductive) to capture the many faces of their music.

The second cardinal point is strictly technical: Sonic Youth changed the way the electric guitar is conceived, using it in a total way, pushing beyond its orthodox use. Building on the lesson of composer Glenn Branca, guitarists Moore and Ranaldo play the instrument in its entirety, exploiting its physical component (body, neck, electronics) just as much as its melodic one (notes, chords, scales), going as far as preparing their guitars, modifying their electronics, striking them with objects, experimenting with droning and feedback, or - in the melodic passages - trying out unconventional tunings. The vast majority of their songs are built from just a few notes and simple chords, but played with unusual tunings that help generate (also thanks to a heavy use of effects) that crooked, ramshackle, liquefied sound they perfected over the years.

Finally, crucial was the iconographic contribution they made to underground culture, with their surreal, estranging lyrics, their youthful and eccentric look, and their commercial ethic, which first turned them into indie stars (Kim Gordon especially, by now a true "feminist" icon of rock), and later into genuine patrons, always on the lookout for young bands and new alternative acts to promote, as happened with Italy's My Cat Is An Alien, discovered by Thurston Moore.

All of this laid the groundwork for a revolution sown in the Eighties and exploded the following decade through a series of bands more or less indebted to them (Nirvana, Unwound, Pavement, Fugazi, Polvo being the most significant) who followed in their masters' footsteps and made American indie-rock great.

The band's story begins in the late Seventies, when college student Thurston Moore moves to New York, getting close to the hardcore scene (he played in Even Worse) and the no-wave scene. The latter leads him to meet Lee Ranaldo, a guitarist from Glenn Branca's entourage, at the Noise Fest, a no-wave festival organized by Moore himself, where he plays live for the first time with the Arcadians, a band featuring him and his girlfriend and future wife Kim Gordon. Once they find a drummer, the group is renamed "Sonic Youth".

Sonic Youth's first cry is recorded for Glenn Branca's Neutral label and cut with a provisional lineup (Richard Edson, future film and TV actor, on drums). Sonic Youth is a bold mini-LP that reflects a particular way of feeling music, born of the least orthodox strand of post-punk, of the avant-garde and of no-wave. The record is a small manual on the improper (or alternative, if you will) use of rock instrumentation. "The Burning Spear", the album's masterpiece, proves it: the drums, offspring of the most crooked post-punk, lay down a dry, square rhythm with the bass in the background, repeating a simple, groovy, rumbling line - nothing you haven't heard before, so far. But what's that metallic jingling? And that dissonant bellow? The first is the sound of a guitar played with two drumsticks, first rubbed together across the strings, then used as a percussion instrument with which Moore strikes the guitar's body; the second comes from... a drill! With prepared instruments, the four manage to craft a rhythmic rock track with a certain melodic appeal, even though not a single note (bass aside) is actually played.

The other tracks are less radical but each offers valid, distinctive ideas: "I Dreamed I Dream" drags itself along, driven by two repetitive, jangling guitars, "She's Not Alone" doubles down with a tribal groove and a guitar reduced to a purely rhythmic function, "The Good And The Bad" even propels hammering noise with an early-Killing Joke-style funk rhythm. All of this is a modest preview of the infernal music on the following LP, and an interesting - if still unripe - manifesto of the atmosphere in underground New York in the early Eighties.

In 1983, after a small lineup change (Jim Sclavunous and Bob Bert replace Edson on drums), their debut album Confusion Is Sex is released, again on Neutral.

The record embraces the horror-movie canons of no-wave (metallic noise, obsessive percussiveness, psychic imbalance, metropolitan apocalypse), combining them perfectly in a sequence of exceptional tracks in terms of expressive force and sonic craft. The real revolution lies in the guitar framework: Moore and Ranaldo's sound and style immediately stand apart from other no-wavers thanks to their orderly textures, at times bordering on psychedelic trance, while Kim Gordon plays elementary, repetitive bass lines, intoning urban alienation and anxiety with her icy voice.

"She's In A Bad Mood" stands out as the most musical track, with a hammering finale that will serve as the ABCs for future generations of noise-rockers. From here on, the descent begins into the most unwholesome depths of that monster called the metropolis: a string of cold, atonal tracks haunted by the ghosts and nightmares of human wreckage.

The long dirge of "Protect Me You" and the delirium of "Shaking Hell" (the track most purely no-wave) are perfect examples of the band's poetics: anxiety, fear, an obsession with chaos and the loss of lucidity. The psychotic "Confusion Is Next" is one of the album's peaks: the bass pulses relentlessly, while the distorted, cacophonous clang of the guitars provides a backdrop for phrases repeated almost mechanically by Moore, right up to a near-hardcore finale; not even the bacchanals of the Velvet Underground or Branca's symphonic noise had managed to paint scenes of such total madness. But confusion is also sex. Sex as extreme, violent pleasure, simulated by Ranaldo's deafening blasts (he puts his own seal on the album with the magnificent "Lee Is Free"), and by the mechanical pulse of "The World Looks Red", surreal in being danceable despite the abnormal noises produced by the guitars.

Confusion Is Sex is still one of the most extreme and violent records ever made – to the point of being many fans' favorite in the band's catalogue – and it brings into focus the many brilliant ideas of early Sonic Youth, who even at their debut displayed a command of sonic mass virtually unknown to any other alternative band of the period.

A few months later, the EP Kill Yr Idols – initially released only in Germany by Zensor ("back when nobody seemed to care about putting out a record of ours") – besides revisiting "Protect Me You" and a blazing live version of "Shaking Hell", features three new tracks: the building art punk of the title track, like the Birthday Party on the banks of the Hudson; the ceremonial ring of fire of "Brother James"; and the cryptic "Early Americans".

In 1984, fresh off a disastrous tour in London, Sonic Youth played a string of thrilling shows in New York. Meanwhile, following Kim and Thurston's marriage, the band entered Before Christ Studios in Brooklyn, where, between September and December, with Bob Bert back behind the kit and technical support from Martin Bisi and John Erskine, they recorded the material that would become Bad Moon Rising, a second album that, starting with its title (echoing the anti-war Creedence Clearwater Revival song released in 1969 on "Green River"), expresses a bleak, claustrophobic vision of the state of affairs in a States besieged by Reaganomics. Through a lysergic stream of consciousness (the tracks bleed seamlessly into one another, without interruption), Bad Moon Rising opens up a boundless perception, elevating themes of madness and death to the cornerstones of a lyrical design in which they become nothing less than an escape route toward a freedom made of ancestral visions, cryptic ecstasies, breathless sprints across deserts stretching as far as the eye can see, to the very edge of the world, to the ultimate abyss of reason.

In short, the apocalyptic, "negative" tension of the previous record is overcome, once digested, making way for a noise-driven psychedelia contaminated by the raw nerve of a subversive, intimately earthbound mysticism. So the pumpkin head of the scarecrow burns against a horizon of muted colors, while the skyscrapers of the Big Apple, in a play of light and shadow, conceal rot and decay, love and despair, unheard litanies of derelict beings surrounded by the comings and goings of other outcasts, equally lost but without any awareness of it. And yet this is a city where sudden bursts of hope and innocence bury, even if only for brief moments, terror and anguish, pushing heart and mind elsewhere. Crystal strings, arpeggiated as if in a trance, then slide toward three-dimensional panoramas of drunken nostalgia: the heart in the stomach, pumping blood you won't pour out elsewhere, holding it inside your guts like a memory you'll only unearth during sleepless nights, like a weapon against the slow, inexorable dying out of your own flame ("Intro").

And those labyrinths of atonal convulsions that transfigure the purity of delirium, launching the desert ride of "Brave Men Run (In My Family)", like the Meat Puppets at double speed, pushing on/holding out inside sandstorms, before yielding the stage to the anomic mantra of "Society Is A Hole". A society that creates distance, letting lies become the norm ("…it makes me lie to my friends…"), while the assault of "sacred noise" grows beyond measure.

Everything is contagious, infected, so confused that distinctions dissolve, giving way to a divine babel where, among other things, friends are just "girls locked in boys' bodies". And, while everything is fragmented, on the verge of disintegration, the only lifeline is the search for peace ("We are living in pieces/ I want to live in peace").

Opened by a very lo-fi, disorienting reworking of the Stooges' "Not Right", "I Love Her All The Time" starts out as a declaration of love in the form of lethargic ardor, then turns into a sublime, infernal tribal orgy, defused by one of the most traumatizing distortions ever heard: guitars that literally catch fire, violated with drumsticks and tuned in the most absurd ways. These Sonic Youth are not interested in dwelling on the compositional act, but rather in translating, by any means necessary, certain alterations of consciousness into sound. Then, in the night, a train makes its way through, dazzling with its diamond lights. Detuned strings and sleepwalking spoken word, a ritualistic crescendo ("Ghost Bitch"), up to a catalepsy raised to the level of a Native American dance in "I'm Insane" (with a coda of frequencies and alien voices), in a ring of fire where the madman proclaims his madness, dislocating its very "ratio" ("Inside my head my dog's a bear/ She was significant").

Conceptually, the album closes with the depressed figure of a guitar carrying its agony beyond the chaotic circle of "Justice Is Might". But from a "lyrical" point of view, the raging descent into hell of "Death Valley '69" (inspired by the Manson "family" massacres, and bolstered by Lydia Lunch's vocal contribution) represents its true resolution, with its hallucinated overtones, its horror-film atmosphere, its wild gallop through the canyons and forests, rivers and mountains of an America lit up by napalm fireworks.

After the visionary bender of the "bad moon" and the arrival of drummer Steve Shelley, coming from punk outfit Crucifucks, came the call from Black Flag guitarist Greg Ginn, who signed the band to his label SST, through which, in May 1986, came out Evol, regarded by many as the band's true masterpiece.

Evol represents an essential turning point in the quartet's sonic evolution. Mediating between the noise experimentalism of their early work and a songwriting approach more oriented toward song form, this album can rightly be seen as a kind of watershed between the band's first and second phases. The unhealthy darkness that enveloped the previous record is here replaced by chiaroscuros that are almost romantic, even if sonic disturbance still ultimately triumphs. So while the first minute of "Tom Violence" (with its epic, languid pace) suggests a normalization underway, the remaining two minutes drag us into a dark swell of fibrillating noise that burns like embers on a bed of ice.

Violence is "a dream", Moore declares. But it's a dream that soon spills over into the intimacy of a hushed confession like that of "Shadow Of A Doubt". While the guitars tick away like a sticky music box, Kim whispers, almost in a trance, the secret that splits reality from imagination: a dualism sharpened by the clash between the poisoned candor of a nocturnal elegy and the ragged tear of chords on a collision course with the truth as it reveals itself, raw and bare: "It's just a dream/ It's just a dream I had". The dream, in short, as the bed into which the music keeps returning to regenerate itself. Or as a path toward invisibility, the real antidote to being shattered: “My mother used to say / ‘You’re the boy that can enjoy invisibility’/ I’m the boy that can enjoy invisibility/ Close your eyes make a wish/ Cross yourself/ See yourself/ Feel yourself”.  Introduced by a tangle of sinister din, the music box of "Secret Girl" suspends this chanteuse of New York's moral decay in the limbo of an inert sense of time. No longer a future to discover day by day, but only an eternal present digging through the rubble of memories.

But the dreamlike component naturally also hides a diabolical counterpart (up to the macabre, depressed and dissociated climax of "Marilyn Moore"), even when the arrangements hint at a more decisive turn toward "pop" territory, as in the proud chant of the single "Star Power", suddenly plunged into the scalding acid of a lysergic (pre-)grunge.

The hallucinated atmosphere and anarchic drive of the "bad moon" return in the delirium of "In The Kingdom #19", with Mike Watt on bass: a free-form collapse of spoken word and derelict urban everyday life, teetering between different, opposing vanishing points (just as the instrumental bacchanal of "Death To Our Friends" thrashes furiously between exponential escapes and stormy whirlpools). The martial, Velvet-esque "Green Light" instead spins on itself like a mantra of self-flaying, before sliding (with "Sister" just around the corner…) into the murderous jaws of an atonal ravine, toward the enchantment of a malevolent dirge.

If Evol is an ambiguous title (it's "love" spelled backwards, pronounced like "ivol", in assonance with "evil"), then the key to it all lies in that endlessly running (∞) masterpiece "Expressway To Your Skull" (listed on the back cover as "Madonna, Sean and Me" and on the lyric sheet as "The Crucifixion Of Sean Penn"): an epic crescendo of feverish, crisp, sarcastic ("We're gonna kill/ the California girls") desolation, devoted to the pursuit of an endless happiness ("We're gonna find the meaning/ Of feeling good"), through dissonant destruction and bass lines that, as in a reverse tracking shot, descend back toward the center of the Universe, sinking into an everlasting drone. A locked groove of anguish (an anguish that defaces the false myths of flower-power and the summer of love), where sounds are pure images carved into the weave of silence.

Enthusiastic about the album, and in particular about the track “Secret Girl”, director Ken Friedman asked the band to write the soundtrack for his road movie, Made In USA. Moving away from the experimentalism of previous records, the quartet rather surprisingly focuses on mostly instrumental pieces, with chiaroscuro, evocative tones, though rarely truly able to strike the right chord. Dreamlike tracks such as “Hairpiece Lullaby 1 & 2”, “Moon In The Bathroom”, “Lincoln's Gout”, “Coughing Up Tweed” and “The Dynamics Of Bulbing” force the band's sonic fabric into a groove of impressionistic traditionalism that, naturally, has great mother America as its emotional centre of gravity. In some ways one might venture comparisons with Ry Cooder's “Paris, Texas” (see, for example, the four variations on “Smoke Blisters”, where you really feel you're in the presence of the desert's silent grandeur), but the songwriting is not always up to the task, often showing a certain degree of creative unease, as well as a basic repetitiveness. While “Web Of Mud 1, 2 & 3” experiments with clangs, dissonances and introverted harmonics, the rest of the album is divided, in a rather chaotic fashion, between the power-pop sparks of “Bachelor's in Fur”, “Full Chrome Logic” and “Cork Mountain Incident”, the emphasis of “Tuck N Dar”, the garage-rock accents and sibylline touches of “Thought Bubbles”, and the vaguely western-tinged country of “Rim Thrusters”. There are also three revisions of “Secret Girl”: “The Velvet Plug” gives much more room to the “concrete” cobwebs of the intro while slowing down its melodic part; “Tulip Fire” reduces that melodic part to metallic dust; and finally “O. J.'s Glove Or What?” gets lost behind a veil of mystery.

Fresh off the acclaim earned by Evol and having joined the roster of the important label SST, the following year Sonic Youth released Sister, an album that heightens their attention to slowed-down melodic textures, run through with constant dissonant interplay, while at the same time establishing them as highly skilled songwriters capable of the widest range of shades: hallucinated, ironic, unhinged, visionary.

The album represents an important transition towards “sonic maturity”, towards a precise and highly personal definition of a post-punk made up of abrasive ballads, rhythmic fragmentation and incendiary riffs, while also testifying to the effort of condensing the long rides of previous records into “songs” averaging four minutes in length. The result is perhaps their most “rock” album to date, one that openly pays homage to classic punk-rock (the Stooges above all) in fast, explicit tracks like “Catholic Block” and in the cover of Crime's “Hot Were My Heart”, without losing any of the distinctive traits that were beginning to earn Sonic Youth wider recognition.

Alongside electric ballads that are at once nervous and fluid (often within themselves as well), there lives on the now-familiar constellation of distortions and destructurings that intervene to smear psychotic pathos over otherwise almost radio-friendly song fragments: the splendid “Tuff Gnarl” and “Pipeline/Kill Time” can rightly be seen as ideal emblems of the balance achieved between the two artistic souls of the New York band, and of its mastery in balancing noise experimentation and punk drive with the increased accessibility of a songwriting approach that was beginning to embrace melody more clearly.

From the harsh, lopsided psychedelia of the opening “Schizophrenia” to the elaborate crescendos of “Kotton Krown”, through to the feverish conciseness of closer “White Cross”, one begins to clearly glimpse the traits that will characterise the central part of the band's output and that will find full expression already in the following, magnificent Daydream Nation.

The last record released for SST (leaving aside the live album Sonic Death, released in 1988 and containing on-stage performances from between 1981 and 1983), the EP Master-Dik represents one of the most anomalous moments of their career. Musically speaking, it's a highly incoherent work that tries at all costs to be disconcerting. Between a reworking of “Master Dik” that, besides replacing Shelley with a drum machine (ending up sounding like a cross between the least belligerent Big Black and Run DMC's shy cousins!), also features J Mascis on lead guitar, and a truly out-of-place cover of the Ramones (“Beat On The Brath”), the “bulk” of the record is given over to mini-suites such as the bizarre “Under The Influence Of The Jesus & Mary Chain/Ticket To Ride/Master-Dik/Introducing The Stars” (where you can hear snippets of an interview with a French journalist, a strange rendition of the Liverpool knights, and assorted chaos) and the chaotic, coarse divertissement of “Ringo/He's On Fire/Florida Oil Drums”. Setting aside the more than superfluous “Chinese Jam” and “Vibrato/Guitar Lick/Funky Fresh”, the field recordings of “Our Backyard” do offer some points of interest. But, all things considered, this is material for hardcore completists.

By 1988, Sonic Youth already had behind them a run of excellent albums showing marked technical and stylistic progress towards a canonisation of their dissonances, moving in the direction of a form more oriented towards the rock song. If “Sister” bubbled over with garage-rock urges, the double LP Daydream Nation was the definitive step towards codifying noise-rock as we understand it today: tracks structured into verses and choruses (bar the occasional detour or noise coda) with genuine vocal melodies and riffs, while still retaining in this case the unorthodox use of instrumentation that had characterised the first six years of sonic youth.

The miracle of Daydream Nation lies precisely in bending the band's typical dissonant harmonies to the rock format, rather than to twisted symphonies of decay. The mood changes too, becoming more varied, with broader-breathing atmospheres ranging from the generational anthem to the punk outburst to the lysergic trip, with the constant of a disoriented, unhealthy mood that winds its way as much through the alienating, surreal lines of the lyrics as through Lee Ranaldo's torrents of noise.

It's precisely a rock anthem that opens the record, singing of a “Teenage Riot” that stands as the manifesto of the underground culture born around the independent labels of the 1980s. It's a roaring, timeless track that explodes after a gentle opening and delivers a riff as lopsided as it is perfect, while Moore sings with the fire of a teenager. He's also at the centre of “Silver Rocket”, a supersonic punk-rock track swallowed up by a disjointed noise interlude, out of which the driving riff slowly re-emerges in a devastating crescendo.

The first half of the record is home to Kim Gordon's two masterpieces, “The Sprawl” and “Cross The Breeze”, two magnificent experiments in song form. The first part moves with a Velvet Underground-like gait, complete with spoken-word lyrics, before levitating into a shapeless, alienating coda in which the instruments repeat a looping phrase; the second, by contrast, turns into a proper song after a pounding electric charge.

Adding colour to the album are “Hey Joni” and “Eric's Trip”, two ballads penned by Ranaldo that reveal his love of American psychedelia; his unmistakable Reed-/Dylan-esque delivery hovers between singing and spoken declamation.

The second LP of the album sharpens the mood, first with the ballad “Candle”, then with the maximalist distortions of “Rain King”, an exercise in the systematic torture of instruments. Finally, the imposing suite “Trilogy” unfolds in three movements; it's a colossal track that moves from the menacing pulses of the first movement to the psychedelia of the second, ending with the hardcore blast of the last.

Daydream Nation is a total album, born to become a classic and to mark the definitive passage from the 1980s into the 1990s. Its grooves manage to concentrate the anger, disillusionment, hopes, dreams and nightmares of an entire generation that would come of age with Sonic Youth and carry over into the following decade, bringing American alternative rock of the previous decade to its ultimate fruition.

Having become the standard-bearers of American independent rock, Sonic Youth followed in the footsteps of R.E.M. and Husker Du and signed to a major label, bringing the first phase of their career to a close; this choice would draw criticism from many fans (some going so far as to consider them artistically finished from this point on).

“Punk went good with Madonna (…) I put a picture of Madonna on my bass” (Mike Watt).

Ciccone Youth is a bizarre avant-pop supergroup put together by the sonic crew with the friendly participation of Mike Watt, bassist of Minutemen and fIREHOSE (plus J Mascis on one track), endlessly experimenting in the studio with unlikely electro-noise-rock jams and pseudo-covers of Madonna (and Robert Palmer).

A collection of deranged song sketches, samples and cut-ups, sung in a debauched style ("Into The Groovey"), with unusual beatbox drums alongside metallic guitars that mark out the sound in distinctive fashion ("Macbeth", "Platoon II", "Me & Jill/Hendrix Cosby", "March Of The Ciccone Robots", "Children Of Satan/Third Fig" with its Talking Heads-style syncopation).

How to take this project... for what it is: an unhinged, amused situationist get-together ("kind of scary", according to Watt), a sort of hysterical-yet-sly tour by champions of rock underground.

Preceded in '86 by the single "Into The Groove(y)/Burnin' Up", The Whitey Album raised expectations only to disappoint, amounting to little more than a sketchy, uncertain project, a scattershot and rather wearying hodgepodge, with far less substance than the "White Album" it took its cue from.

There's no shortage of enjoyable, even irresistible moments, though: think of the coolness of Watt's "Burnin' Up", or the impeccable cover of "Addicted To Love" courtesy of a sultry Kim, or "Making The Nature Scene", with its hip-hop verses delivered in a dazed spoken-word style.

Although the hits land somewhat by chance amid the unevenness and tedious spoken intros, The Whitey Album is a solid preview of what would soon be dubbed slacker-rock.

Reissued several times over the years, the 2006 remaster of the album adds a compelling alternate take of "Macbeth".

For completists of the band and fans of the most experimental lo-fi pop.

Goo (1990) is the first album released under the Sonic Youth name for Geffen Records, and it's a settling-down record after the revolutionary jolt of its predecessor. The band softens the medicine of Daydream Nation somewhat, smoothing out the edges of certain distortions and tightening up the length of certain instrumental digressions; on the other hand, the sound becomes beefier, almost grunge, proof that Moore and co. knew exactly what was emerging in Seattle in those years. For the most part the album sounds rather unremarkable, drifting along without offering many truly outstanding moments, starting with the opener "Dirty Boots", which sounds like a rowdier version of "Schizophrenia".

The truly significant tracks are the ones that retain the psychedelic sprawl of the previous record, like "Tunic (Song For Karen)", with an excellent Gordon moving from spoken word to a seductive sung delivery while the instruments veer off from the chorus's main melody. The other masterpieces on the record are the epic gallop of "Cinderella's Big Score" and the towering closer "Titanium Expose", a chameleonic track sung by Moore and Gordon that crosses the obsessive noise of Big Black with the acidic edge of psychedelia.

The rest of the tracklist is split between decidedly weak tracks (like the disfigured punk-pop of "Mary-Christ", the hardcore of "Mildred Place" or "My Friend Goo" with its distorted bass riff) and others that, while not thrilling, are still solid, such as "Kool Thing", featuring Chuck D of Public Enemy as guest vocalist (Moore has always been a hip-hop devotee), and "Disappearer", in the style of earlier albums.

Despite the presence of some slapdash or weak tracks, Goo paves the way for the mainstream success of the albums that followed; Sonic Youth stop being an alternative phenomenon and become genuine icons of American rock.

After a transitional record, Sonic Youth arrive at a new sound, stripped of the ethereal, liquid quality that had always set them apart and defined instead by a dirtier, heavier tone, in line with the shambling sounds of the grunge era, by then at its peak. With Dirty (1992), the New York band offers its own take on the very Seattle grunge sound it had itself helped inspire. On one hand, a few purists turn up their noses; on the other, the band enjoys previously unimaginable success, the result of their most accessible album to date.

The record is a half-successful experiment; on one hand, the old genius shines through in a handful of tracks that rival any classic from their past catalogue, while on the other, a clutch of songs appears — including the singles — that demote Sonic Youth from masters to competent journeymen chasing the latest trend. Kim Gordon's minimal basslines give way to heavy distorted riffs, Moore's boyish singing becomes as hoarse and halfhearted as Cobain's (while Gordon seems to mimic riot grrrl screams), and even the two guitars' interweaving arabesques collapse into more monolithic riffs. This gives rise to the record's most straightforward and forgettable tracks, "Drunken Butterfly", "100%" and "Youth Against Fascism", saved from mediocrity only by the odd clever touch (for instance, the riff on the last of these, played by rubbing a drumstick against the strings).

Elsewhere, the album offers some thoroughly respectable moments, like the galloping "Chapel Hill" and the solemn "JC" and "Theresa's Sound-World", in which that clear, crystalline, burning sound that made Sonic Youth great comes back to life. "Sugar Kane" is another high point, a track continually upended by epic bursts of noise and pop hooks; the desperate "Wish Fulfillment" is a towering showcase for Ranaldo, with an arpeggiated verse and a titanic distortion that builds until it explodes in the chorus.

Having worked through their grunge phase, Sonic Youth have the wisdom to step away before the Seattle bandwagon crashes, right around the time of Cobain's suicide. Experimental Jet Set, Trash & No Star, from 1994, is indeed an adventurous, difficult, anti-commercial album, which nonetheless achieves great popular success even though the band skipped the promotional tour due to Kim Gordon's pregnancy.

With the hefty guitars of Dirty set aside, a darker, more rust-caked sound comes to the fore, snaking through some of the most anguished tracks Sonic Youth ever wrote. The pieces on this record are non-songs that find their ideal beauty in incompleteness, in a taste for the raw, the unfinished, the ramshackle. You can tell from the first seconds of the lo-fi gem "Winner's Blues" that things have changed; even the single "Bull In The Heather" shows Sonic Youth in an unfamiliar guise, a track with no melodic drive at all, split between docile arpeggios and the noise of strings scraped raw with picks.

The remaining tracks are all small masterpieces: from the ballad "Self Obsessed And Sexxee" to the bittersweet psychedelia of "Sweet Shine", by way of moments of classic schizophrenia like "Androgynous Mind" and "Starfield Road", rattled by electronic cacophonies.

The only track that reconnects with the grunge experience is "Screaming Skull", whose lyrics look back to the SST years, before the band reached wider fame.

After two records that pushed them to considerable heights of popularity (partly thanks to a dubious association with grunge), Sonic Youth go through yet another of the many turning points in their career. With the clamor of those who'd only discovered them after more than ten years of activity having died down, at least in part, the band releases an extremely complex album, and certainly not one designed to win over new converts. Washing Machine represents, on one hand, a return to a primal inspiration, dotted with post-punk surges and a calm working-over of dissonant textures, and on the other, the definitive transition to a "sonic maturity" - artistic, chronological and also personal, given that this is the first album after the birth of Coco Hayley, daughter of Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore.

Defying any expectation of fatigue, this is a dense, thoroughly vital album in which meticulously crafted electric textures, punk incursions and more subdued ballads coexist side by side, their tones on a couple of occasions decidedly hazy. Even in these latter cases, the band's now-signature inlays of sound and faint roughness are not absent, even if here they serve soft pieces like the near-lullaby "Unwind" and the all-female tune "Little Trouble Girl" (which also features Kim Deal).

These, however, are isolated episodes across the record's more-than-an-hour running time, over the course of which the band proves it hasn't lost its old stinging charge: fine evidence comes from the unhinged tracks sung by Gordon, whose spirit as an alternative sex symbol hasn't been dulled by motherhood, still able to vent itself in the hallucinated deconstruction of the title track and in the persistent no-wave provocation of "Panty Lies".

But the core essence of the record, and of its mature balance between noise elucubrations and jagged melodies in song form, lies in the fluid guitar interplay, which lends itself just as readily to disorienting harmonic iterations as to stinging crescendos, often coexisting within the same track. The sound of a now forty-something Sonic Youth is all there in the eternal punk-youth spirit of "Becuz" and "No Queen Blues", but also in the disenchanted awareness of tracks like "Junkie's Promise" and "Skip Tracer", which find their ultimate outcome in the disarming finale of "Diamond Sea": twenty intense, hazy minutes, almost the soundtrack to a dream that embraces an entire artistic journey and demonstrates the greatness of a band capable of using different languages and of pulling off the not-so-easy feat of channeling into accessible forms the suggestions and experiments traceable back to their whole musical evolution.

Alongside the release of Washing Machine, the band kicks off a series of parallel productions on its newly founded label, Sonic Youth Recordings, explicitly geared toward more experimental ends, where they could freely indulge the urge to explore new musical paths - a drive still as present as it had been at their origins.

This return to the initial exploratory spirit (more on a conceptual level than a strictly musical one) is also evident in the following A Thousand Leaves, which closely follows the first two SYR-branded releases, Anagrama and Slaapkamers Met Slagroom.

In May '97, with the fumes of the double album Washing Machine not yet fully cleared, Sonic Youth released an enigmatic cardboard-sleeved mini-CD titled Anagrama (SYR 1). This release launched the Sonic Youth Records label (which Thurston ran alongside his own label, Ecstatic Peace!) and embarked on a project meant to champion experimental leanings, foster intellectual impulses and avant-garde leaps otherwise curbed by the pressures of the music industry.

According to critics, this marks a hard and pure return to the band's past: a reclaiming of their origins and of that lucid, grimy instinct of the first four albums, before the pop acquiescence of records like Goo, Dirty and so on crept in and overtook their other "sonic" sides.

Guilty conscience or not, Moore and co. venture down this "dark" path with brazen determination.

Anagrama comes in a cardboard sleeve that clearly evokes Philips' pioneering 1960s electronic music series Prospective 21° Siècle. The ambitions and intentions are indeed similar: to offer sounds that place "the pre-existing within an unfamiliar context" (to quote Vittorio Gelmetti) and shed light on unusual, acute fascinations, probing atavistic, unconscious human impulses.

Four instrumental improvisations test the waters. While the zero-gravity atmosphere of the miniature "Tremens" recalls the post-rock of the era, the long title track offers a reflective summary of the band's sonic palette. Then come synth oscillations, guitar loops and white noise in exploratory mode ("Improvisation ajoutée", "Mieux- de corrosion"), revealing the more disturbing, abstract side of this new chapter.

At the end of summer '97 comes the second mini-CD: Slaapkamers Met Slagroom, a sort of continuum of the previous one, but also built on instrumental ideas that would later surface on A Thousand Leaves.

The title track is a possible noise answer to the Tortoise suite “Djed”: it opens with a Thurston Moore riff flanked by drums, repeated ad libitum; what follows are layers of feedback and distortion pedals raising a thunderous kraut-rock wind in the background. The racket builds through the track (recalling the most cosmic and hypnotic side of Stereolab), between relentless drumming and swirling guitar eddies. The orchestral flow dominates the scene until an abrupt cutoff leads into the following “Stil”, a minimalist whirlpool fought over by guitar distortion and celestial percussion. The band then carves out “Herinneringen”, a delicate piece run through with Kim Gordon's vocal quirks.

The third installment of this parallel series marks Sonic Youth's first collaboration with Chicago musician Jim O'Rourke, one of the most ingenious compositional talents in rock avant-garde and experimentation over the past twenty years. The musician as programmer, as a “nodal bridge” that opens up new musical possibilities and surreal angles; one who restores ambiguity and instills the allure of the unknown.

With its skillful weave of sonic dynamics, tonal variety and swirling syntheses, Invito Al Ĉielo lands a masterstroke, standing out as one of the essential albums of the new label, but also as one of the most remarkable records released under the Sonic Youth name in recent times.

Two long, immersive ambient compositions take the stage here, strewn with inventive touches, unfolding like feverish, hermetic universes with restless, dreamlike pulses. A spiritual, dramatic journey that foreshadows a new order: O'Rourke's evolved ceremonial conspiracy, a musician steeped in classical heritage, triumphs and corrects what was still vague and blurred in the previous SYR releases, injecting a new geometric logic and a powerful vital energy. The title track and “Radio-amatoroj” deploy broad syntheses of rock and high-level avant-garde; an alienated, diaphanous ambient backdrop is hallucinated by lysergic assaults and noise colorings, trumpet swirls and glitch laptop inserts. Disorienting melodic paths with a distinctly opaque-futuristic feel are gradually developed through harmonies and dissonances of amplified synths, manipulated according to the “intuitive” Stockhausen of the opus “Aus Den Sieben Tagen”.

It is a continuous exploration of earthly images and celestial apparitions, between ascents and forays into space: motorik kraut-rock scouting ahead, post-rock-like guitars in perpetual accompaniment-strumming suspended on the edge of the void, celestial keyboard pulsations, occasional noise blasts. And then there are flickers, residues and hums, radio waves and abstract noise, clangs and instrumental percussion.

The following album A Thousand Leaves comes across as a weighty work, clocking in at an hour and a quarter with mostly long, elaborate tracks, pulling the band further away from the indie-rock label it had been saddled with, and returning it to its original interlocking play of sonic whirlwinds, feedback and dissonance.

Almost as a counterbalance to the meticulous sound design of the long piéces that stand as true sonic symphonies dotted with variations, the album also finds Sonic Youth engaging in a couple of decidedly more immediate ideas, namely the sun-drenched pop song “Sunday” and the jingle-jangle opening of the otherwise harsh and destructured “Female Mechanic Now On Duty”.

Broadly speaking, the tracks featuring Gordon on vocals are the most direct and nervous ones, exercises in a rock'n'roll whose jagged edges still highlight the vibrant sensuality of her performances (“French Tickler”, “The Ineffable Me”).

By contrast, the greater composure of Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo is entrusted with the tracks that best capture the stylistic signature of this evolutionary stage of the band: a moment in which the roaring guitars are by no means set aside, nor are the dissonant forays of the past abandoned, but they are more often diluted into an apparent calm, where unease hums beneath the surface, simply yet powerfully elevating layered, visionary textures. Such is the case with the minute perfection of a snowflake, rendered extraordinarily in the dreamy “Hoarfrost” and in the heartfelt elegy to Allen Ginsberg contained within the eleven minutes of small eddies and enveloping melodies of “Hits Of Sunshine”.

Working in ways only partly different from their usual approach, Sonic Youth prove they can still operate at an excellent level of inspiration, and if not for the two closing tracks of an already long and elaborate album, A Thousand Leaves could be considered a true manifesto of the New York band's mature age.

As mentioned, the third installment of the SYR series, Invito Al Ĉielo, marks the meeting and the beginning of the collaboration with Jim O'Rourke, who for some time would join the band on a steady basis, remaining an integral part of it through the following NYC Ghosts & Flowers as well. On this album, O'Rourke's contribution is in fact limited to just three tracks, on which he plays bass and electronics, though his compositional presence proves more evident.

Entirely inspired by a visionary, decadent New York, the record marks a further derailment from the band's recent sound, toward destructurings that now almost completely set aside harmonic lines in favor of rhythmic iterations, oppressive mantras, spoken word, spasms and minimal noise-making. In the claustrophobic urban landscapes painted this time within a concise span of just over forty minutes, there is no longer any room for song-form interludes, nor for the gradual unfolding of the previous album's long tracks; instead everything revolves around a sonic inquiry aimed, more than at noise itself, at the intersection of instrumental weaves and the resulting creation of spectral atmospheres. The tone of the album, and its dedication to New York, almost read as uneasy omens of disaster, of forbidding post-atomic landscapes, which ultimately add little to Sonic Youth's recent evolution, stripping down to bare structures the renewed experimental streak of the immediately preceding works and the early SYR releases, from which NYC Ghosts & Flowers ends up not straying very far.

Credited to Sonic Youth together with numerous guests (William Winant/ Jim O'Rourke/ Takehisa Kosugi/ Christian Wolff/ Christian Marclay/ Coco Hayley Gordon Moore/ Wharton Tiers), the monumental double LP/CD Goodbye 20th Century (1999) is a journey we can promise is difficult but fascinating, one that pays tribute to the twentieth century at its close through free interpretations of contemporary music pieces.

Pride of place goes to some of the century's greatest composers, such as John Cage, George Maciunas, Pauline Oliveros, Steve Reich, Cornelius Cardew, Christian Wolff. Production duties again fall to Jim O'Rourke, together with William Winant; present throughout the tracks, the two oversee and direct the ceremony in the studio.

Especially extraordinary in Goodbye 20th Century is the presence of some of the original composers themselves, which lends the project, as ambitious as it is commendable, a seal of approval and a decisive sense of perspective.

Oliveros even composed a piece for the occasion, titled "Six For New Time – For Sonic Youth".

Goodbye 20th Century is a poetic survey, a free artistic digression whose deliberate sequencing and calm power, laden with musical energy, take on an intrinsic aesthetic value. An excursus that is both traceable back to its model and perfectly autonomous at the same time, moving in multiple directions and through sinuous conflicts, ultimately finding a classical balance and breadth.

The dynamics of the music are shot through with an agitated, looming sense, an impetuous and bewitched tremor, a dynamism that grows and keeps shifting shape. If it isn't the expressive peak of the SYR series, it's certainly the most emblematic entry, one that bows while twisting, and ranks among the most genuine artistic monuments to twentieth-century art.

Meanwhile, the sonic and seditious musings bearing the Sonic Youth Records imprint continue. This time the stage belongs to Kim Gordon alone, joined by two musicians from the New York scene: Ikue Mori on drums and electronics, and DJ Olive (aka Gregor Asch) on turntables.

SYR 5 – キム ゴードン* / DJ オリーブ* / イクエ モリ* ミュージジャル パースペスティブ (1999) is a genuine electro-psychedelic trip with a cinematic allure, split into sections with an erratic flow. A compound rich in energetic impulses, eleven sections of electroacoustic, impro-rock and industrial music in free collision. A disorienting, shapeshifting example of so-called "illbient music": to put it in the words of one of its architects, DJ Olive, it's a mix of "ill" (a sort of benign, healing infection) and "ambient", variously infused with collage flair and sensory "dub-soundscapes" inserts; its origins are said to trace back to the early '90s in neighborhoods of the Big Apple like Brooklyn and Manhattan (a useful retrospective compilation is "Incursions In Illbient", Asphodel Records, 1996).

SYR 5 delivers a hallucinated, kaleidoscopic sonic cataclysm, as if glimpsed in a half-sleep; a surreal, pyrotechnic explosion that's a pleasure to behold, draped in vintage keyboards and organs and woven through with Gordon's pounding electric guitars, amid myriad shards of noise, loops and samples conjuring prophetic images and half-remembered visions. Gordon's semi-spoken delivery is hushed and anxious, a rocket-girl gripped by delirium and celestial visions, as if she were suffering firsthand, in sudden jolts, the storms of this narcotic, shapeshifting musical electro-shock.

Sonic Youth's journey resumes two years later with the solid Murray Street (2002). A detour, but without any major surprises, the album contains the present-day genius of Lee Ranaldo and co.: the beguiling skill of crafting songs where noise merges with melody, knowing how to make the most of every single moment, from the avant-garde ones to the less oblique ones, all while staying true to the coordinates that have always defined the New York band. Jim O'Rourke has by now become a full member of the group, and certain more open passages, with faint, distant echoes of pop, may well be down to him.

The opening tracks "The Empty Page" and "Disconnection Notice" are typical Sonic Youth songs for Thurston Moore's voice: melodically raw, with a frenzy that seems deceptive, only to arrive right on cue with concrete final deflagrations. Less original, but still enjoyable, is the following "Rain On Tin", where the relentless (and never excessive) closing wall of sound, built on their trademark guitars, has the flavor of a "heard-it-before" that's still a pleasure to hear again. With "Karen Revisited", a track running past the ten-minute mark, the album reaches one of its high points: a skewed yet accessible hypnosis finds its perfect evolution the moment the song's structure is abandoned and that effects-laden noise takes over, which many have tried in vain to emulate. "Radicals Adults Like Godhead Style", while not unpleasant, comes across as a lesser "Theresa's Sound World", while on the closing "Plastic Sun" and "Sympathy For The Strawberry" it's finally Kim Gordon's turn on vocals, superb as she moves from the first track's streaked schizophrenia to the cathartic sweetness of the second.

Sonic Nurse (2004) confirms a greater pursuit of the clean riff, of elegant guitar interplay. "Pattern Recognition" is a powerful pop song, with Kim Gordon singing in her usual style. The placid rhythm of "Unmade Bed" introduces us to the first track sung by Moore, its bridge entrusted to guitars that are not even particularly noisy, almost recalling the more electric side of Neil Young. "Kim Gordon And The Arthur Doyle Hand Cream" has the bassist once again playing the outsider grappling with mass-market youth idols, a track that would like to slap the album awake, with its lopsided, jagged guitars, but which still resolves into the same old, worn-out chorus.

At this point there's no use describing tracks like "Stones" and "Dude Ranch Nurse", tedious and predictable déjà vu, full of the usual dissonances and guitar interplay. Yet, in closing, the band drops a track worth remembering: "I Love Golden Blue" has an almost ambient intro, then turns into music in perpetual tension, ecstatic and ethereal, with Kim Gordon singing almost under her breath; even when it seems to foreshadow an obvious explosion, the choice is to rein it in within a hazy stasis. A track that tiptoes along, paving the way for the closing piece, where Moore sends this sort of Crazy Horse-style gang into a serene, almost amusing ballad.

In 2006,  Rather Ripped marks a new turn toward more properly pop-rock territory.

The delightful opening progression of "Reena" is the perfect encapsulation of this new persona: Gordon singing like an eighteen-year-old, carefree in every fiber, the track flowing along calmly, velvety smooth, its brief instrumental surge of sweetened distortion, and still more rising, rising progressions. It will be the only track on the record that's entirely in focus. Because, soon enough, you'll start having to count the survivors. Not right away, though: first comes "Incinerate", which again offers a sweet, faintly ringing progression, with a surprising guitar solo. So that's what those interviews meant when they talked about hard rock!

"Do You Believe In Rapture?", with docile arpeggios flirting with darker ones, delivers the first yawn, though. Vaguely tribal percussion and guitar solos try to give some bite to the ordinary "Sleepin' Around"; electronic winds attempt the same with "What A Waste". "Jams Run Free" offers one of the more interesting ideas, with a good keyboard progression, but Gordon whispering about love is something you just can't stand, and the trademark distortion doesn't help matters. "Rats" draws its life from a dark-tinged flash of blues/hard rock. "Turquiose Boy", a classic stretch of a track, nicely arpeggiated but not developed properly, opens up too late and without enough bite. "Lights Out", with Moore's warm whisper and an enveloping solo, ends up being one of the better solutions here. "Neutral", on the other hand, wastes an overused yet effective hook on a cloying, over-sweet arrangement.

We're nearing the end, but there's still room to throw down a redeeming stone: a much more classic (semi-)instrumental called "Pink Steam", which, with its interweaving and blending, is easy to listen to. And to close things out on a flawless note, along comes "Or", a delicate, dark, and vaguely metallic outro.

As their contractual relationship with DGC-Geffen draws to a close, the four masters of noise rock gather a handful of outtakes, b-sides and unreleased tracks into a farewell album with the label that gave them the chance to cross over to major-label territory in the wake of the nuclear blast that was Daydream Nation. The Destroyed Room. B-Sides and Rarities is a most welcome gift for every die-hard completist of Sonic Youth's discography, but it can hardly be labeled a collection of leftovers or second choices; rather, it's a sequence of tracks that once again highlight the pioneering, experimental spirit that has always defined the New Yorkers' career. The period covered runs from Experimental Jet Set Trash And No Star to Rather Ripped, excluding rarities from the earlier period already gathered in the thorough deluxe editions that fittingly celebrated the group's first two Geffen-era releases: Goo and the indispensable Dirty. The most recent tracks are three outtakes from Sonic Nurse: besides "Kim's Chord", which starts off delicate before turning disturbed, and "Beautiful Plateau", steeped in quasi-dark shades, both already included on the Japanese version of the album, we find "Fire Engine Dream", a genuinely hypnotic jam that opens the selection. Also from 2003 is "Loop Cat", released on the compilation "You Can Never Go Fast Enough". Two years earlier came "Fauxhemians", already featured on the compilation "All Tomorrow's Party", along with "Queen Anne Chair" and "Three Part Sectional Love Seat", which come from the same recording sessions but were never released. The instrumental "Campfire" (2000) appeared on the little-known collection "At Home With The Groovebox", while the acoustic "Blink" (1999) was part of the soundtrack (produced by Scott Walker) to the French drama "Pola X", starring Guillaume Depardieu and Catherine Deneuve. Closing things out is the torrential "The Diamond Sea" (1995), already featured on Washing Machine but presented here with an alternate ending compared to that version. The oldest tracks are "Razor Blade" (1994) and the T-Vox Version of "Doctor's Order", both b-sides of the cult single "Bull In The Heater", and "Is It My Body?", which appeared both on the b-side of "Sugar Kane" and on an "Alice Cooper Tribute" released by Sub Pop in 1991. "Doctor's Order" and "Is It My Body?" were included exclusively on the double-vinyl edition, while they were left off the CD's tracklist. For the cover image, depicting a room turned upside down, the band chose a 1978 work by Canadian artist Jeff Wall, known for his studies of the photographic process known as Cibachrome.

Clear melodic surges would shape the accomplished Trees Outside The Academy, Thurston Moore's second solo album, miles away from the convolutions of his debut twelve years earlier, and much closer to a gentle, singer-songwriter-style folk-rock. The album (recorded with J Mascis) sounds fresher than the previous two records with the band: there are no classics here, but the guitar playing is at times inspired, impeccably matched to Moore's now-mature voice.

Recorded for a benefit at the Anthology Film Archives in New York in April 2003, Koncertas Stan Brakhage Prisiminimui (2005, SYR 6) provides a live score for screenings of the films of Stan Brakhage, the filmmaker who died that same year (1933-2003). Across three long, untitled tracks, blocks of metallic guitar sound spread over the unforgettable, definitive sequences of a great master whose authentic, subversive, raw and uncomfortable works show the reality and physicality of man without deceit, marking a before and after in the avant-garde of every era.

Together with New York percussionist and multimedia artist Tim Barnes, Sonic Youth merge the body of sound with the body of man. Through striking layering and dissonance, they read and uncover precise permutations and affinities with the destabilizing visual flow in question, aiding its assimilation (at times in a poetic light, at times in a state of panic), in dense, enveloping streams of panacea-like sound.

A magma of debris flows inexorably and slowly downhill.

The first of the two 2008 SYR releases, the seventh for the label, consists of two long improvisations, one per side. The first, J' Accuse Ted Hughes (SYR 7), was recorded live in April 2000 at "All Tomorrow's Parties" in Camber Sands, England, while Sonic Youth were touring behind NYC Ghosts & Flowers. It's a dark, magmatic impro-session noise piece that was originally meant to score a project based on Hughes's work. The guitar interplay, generated like metaphysical duels, conflicting jams of great impact between Moore and Ranaldo, weave an indeterminate, distorted universe, unbridled and hallucinatory. An ulcerated flow that proliferates, inextricable and anguished, through echoes, feedback and dark tolling sounds. Gordon's raw, lacerated trance-like vocals burst into this alienated monoverse, heightening hostility and scattering uneasy allure.

The second track, "Agnès B Musique", was instead recorded in a New York studio in 2003 and once again features Jim O'Rourke, working another acoustic spell of his visionary craft. A serene electro-acoustic whirl built from tolling sounds, harmonic laptop manipulations and guitars contaminates the terrain and rebalances the cataclysms of the first side. Constantly punctuated ambient-drones moving between climax and lulls, celestial scraps of staccato guitar, textures and dynamics unfolding with utopian drive and hallucinated intensity pour out everywhere without pause.

Shortly after came Andre Sider Af Sonic Youth (SYR 8), a single improvised snapshot from the Roskilde Festival in Denmark. A track drawn from an hour-long concert in July 2005 that bridges different musical traditions. The strings of Ranaldo, Gordon, Moore and O'Rourke (who left the band that same year) are "in contention" with Merzbow, the radical Japanese musician on laptops and power electronics, and Mats Gustafsson, the Swedish saxophonist. Here converge the noise experiences of the Big Apple, the radical noise-making of the Land of the Rising Sun, and the currents of European free improvisation. The players occupy the space, sharing out instrumental entries, arrangements and architectures, games and counterweights. A solar whirlwind rises, its aggressive force compounded by harrowing, subversive guitars and electronics (Merzbow), or the blaring sax soliloquy (Gustafsson) set against a host of tribal percussion (Steve Shelley).

The outcome of this gradual chromatic clash between instrumental bodies and breaths is a kind of noise of ecstasy. A deafening free-jazz magma, a memorable multiplicity in which primitive instinct and formal rigor coexist.

The album is a tonal explosion of great expressive force, a jolt of piercing obsession and chromatic exasperation, whose hyperthermia warps surfaces, melting lines and volumes that, from their original solo spaces, reach toward new formal hypotheses and altered plastic values.

After a three-year hiatus devoted mostly to exploring their more experimental side on the SYR releases, Sonic Youth put out a new record, The Eternal (2009), which finds the band once again grappling with their established sound and searching for a rougher, more direct approach capable of reviving the glories of the albums released between the second half of the '80s and the early '90s. That would be the right path to take, if it weren't for the fact that, as with the mediocre Sonic Nurse and Rather Ripped, the overriding impression is of a pale simulacrum of times past, made up almost entirely of self-emulation — filtered, yes, through an extraordinary command of their own means, but at times sadly out of place.

The band's trademark sound is still clearly recognizable in the harsh immediacy of the opening "Sacred Trickster", in the rhythmic insistence of "What We Know", or in the blunted electric nervousness of "Thunderclap For Bobby Pyn" and "Walkin Blue", but the passages where deconstruction alternates with melodic flourishes and dissonant textures drawn from an increasingly unconvincing post-punk aesthetic come off far less effectively. It's a bit disheartening to see Kim Gordon trying to stay true to her old role as alternative erotic icon on a track like "Anti-Orgasm", or to notice, especially in the album's second half, the reassuring college-radio drift of songs that aren't badly built, but ultimately lack any real bite.

It's almost as if Sonic Youth, now fully aware of what can be expected from each new album of theirs, had decided to fulfill their institutional role, doing nothing more than celebrating their own past in a kind of self-cover version of their own style, stitching together scattered quotations from many of their old records. But the fatigue shows through relentlessly, even beneath rhetorical, late-adolescent yelps and routine interlocking games of dissonance and distortion, making The Eternal an album whose surface is, all things considered, rather flat, yet still tiring to listen to, especially given its length, which is truly excessive relative to how little it actually has to say.

Amid the general grayness, only the ten minutes of the closing "Massage The History" are saved, with its continuous, placid variations: too little, however, to spare the album from the overall sense of a tired rehashing of formulas, one that mercilessly underscores the passing of time, even for a band that has meant so much to the last three decades of American alternative rock and beyond.

The return to the SYR series, with its ninth installment, comes in the form of the soundtrack Simon Werner A Disparu, made for the French film of the same name directed by Fabrice Gobert. In these instrumental sketches composed specifically to accompany the film, the quartet is on dazzling form. The usual razor-sharp guitars, biting feedback and unusual, sinister piano figures ("Les Anges Au Piano", "Jean Baptiste a là Fenetre", "La Cabane Au Zodiac", "Jean Baptiste et Laetitia") intertwine to underpin the dark landscape of death visually created by Gobert, significantly amplifying the unease and suspense it evokes. From the violent noise experiments of their early days to the "normalization" toward a more melodic rock (so to speak), it's like being presented with a compendium of the musical art of one of the most influential bands of the last thirty years, albeit stripped — of course — of one of its key components: the voice. Thus, varied shades of color inevitably spread across the thirteen instrumental tracks, which show a band that is by now thoroughly seasoned and incapable of a misstep.

In June 2016 the band decided to release some recordings made in 1986 during the sessions for Made In USA. Spinhead Sessions, as the record is titled, gathers forty minutes of experimentation, opening with the anxiety-inducing guitar landscapes aptly titled "Ambient Guitar & Dreamy Theme": almost a soundtrack for the end of the world, a sonic magma that often spills over into noise and the relentless repetition of instrumental textures. The tribal drumming accompanying the interweavings bordering on industrial in "High Mesa", the minimalism of "Wolf", the horror-movie approach of "Scalping" — everything here is designed to serve as commentary on the film's images, leaving very little room for the accessibility that the four heroes of noise-rock were able to deliver on albums like Dirty and Goo.

Here new paths and new ideas are tested, free to move without too many constraints, but the sense is that too often the band spins its wheels around a handful of ideas repeated endlessly. Spinhead Sessions can therefore be considered a release aimed mostly at die-hard completists, although, with the band on indefinite hiatus, it might prove interesting to many more, at least to those who regard Sonic Youth as one of the most important and influential acts of the last four decades.

The archive Sonic Youth has built up over the years is something boundless: hundreds, perhaps thousands of recordings, some of which are now forming part of a release program personally curated by the band's members. Material that retraces the entire artistic arc of the New York band, a joy for the ears of all those who can't come to terms with their disbandment, a consequence of the breakdown of the personal relationship between Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon. Battery Park, NYC is the recording of a free concert Sonic Youth held in their adopted city, New York, on July 4, 2008, Independence Day, in one of Manhattan's great green spaces. After a bootleg-style release – originally given away with the pre-order of the album “The Eternal” – Matador decided to give this live show a wider release, performed with the addition of Jim O’Rourke, who in those years served as the band's fifth member.

The sonic hypnosis of “She Is Not Alone”, the vivid energy of “Bull In The Heather”, “Hey Joni” and “100 %”, the apocalyptic free-noise charge of “The Sprawl”, with Moore wading into the crowd to rough up his guitar, and the derailing “Silver Rocket” are among the highlights of a performance that never flags. Several tracks are drawn from “Daydream Nation”, fresh from being played in sequence on the celebratory tour of 2007. Three years later, in October 2011, Sonic Youth would end up on indefinite hiatus, though without ever announcing a definitive breakup. Thurston, Lee Ranaldo and Steve Shelley have continued to cross paths with one another, while Kim has split her time between cerebral, hyper-experimental projects and writing the much-discussed book “Girl In A Band”. The dream of everyone who has loved them over the years is to see them all together on stage again. In the meantime, drawing from their archives keeps that flame alive, the one that lights up the unconditional love for a truly one-of-a-kind band.

In March 2022, five unreleased, or at least quite rare, tracks emerged from the archives, dating from the band's final decade, straddling the 2000s and 2010s, collected on the compilation In/Out/In. These are mostly instrumental pieces, except for the vocal lines laid down by Kim Gordon on the title track, distilling dizzying jams built around the concept of improvisation, from which emerge the two sides that have always defined Sonic Youth's stylistic spectrum.

While on the first three tracks (“Basement Contender”, “In & Out” and “Machine”, the shortest one, and the only one with anything resembling a “song” structure) the band leans on gentler guitar interplay that, in its own way, sketches out melodic ideas, the two closing tracks (“Social Static” and “Out & In”, which feature the sonic contribution of Jim O’Rourke) reflect the musicians' more anarchic and experimental side, the one for which they are rightly regarded as among the most intriguing and influential rock avant-gardists of recent decades. And it's here that distortion, atonality and noise take over, the typical moments when Sonic Youth push their instruments toward unknown limits.

In August 2023, the release of archival material continued with Live in Brooklyn 2011, an audio document of Sonic Youth's last concert in North America, a special event held on Friday, August 12, 2011 at the Williamsburg Waterfront in Brooklyn. Seventeen songs performed with the line-up expanded by Pavement bassist Marc Ibold, in front of one of the most spectacular views of the Manhattan skyline, following a double opening act that night from Kurt Vile and Wild Flag. It's a more “alternative” selection than usual, put together specifically by drummer Steve Shelley, featuring material drawn from various chapters of Sonic Youth's artistic journey. One of their many possible retrospectives, designed to favor the band's earliest work, making room for songs that hadn't been played in a long time: to find “Brave Men Run” or “Death Valley 69” – placed here as openers – in one of their sets, you'd have to go all the way back to the Eighties. The five of them shut themselves in the studio for a few days to get reacquainted with the songs and tunings, and even though concerts of this kind in New York had become something of a yearly summer habit for them, in this case – especially with hindsight – one senses they were somehow aware of the inevitability of their own end and wanted to celebrate their glorious past with all the rage they could muster, reasserting the importance of their legacy through the albums that shaped a sound that became unique and instantly recognizable.

After almost five months away from the stage, the Waterfront show also served as a planned warm-up before tackling a five-date mini-tour of South America, which would turn out to be the final act (at least so far) of their story. As many as five of the seventeen tracks performed are drawn from “Bad Moon Rising” (against just three from the more recent “The Eternal”), and nearly all the records from the first part of their career are represented, including “Kill Yr Idols” and “Confusion Is Sex”, something that wouldn't happen on the subsequent, shorter five dates. Alongside bona fide classics such as “Sugar Kane” and “Drunken Butterfly” (both lifted from “Dirty”), the lucky attendees got to watch the band tackle genuine gems like “Kotton Krown”, “Starfield Road” and “Flower”, all together in the same setlist. So you can imagine just how valuable this live document is. A couple of encores were granted, with two surprises at the end: “Psychic Heart”, from one of Thurston Moore's solo albums, and a devastating, endless version of “Inhuman”, more than ten minutes closing the set and generating a dissonant ocean of noise that crashes down with tremendous force on the ecstatic crowd. This would be the last song Sonic Youth ever played in New York, a circle closing right where it had been written at the dawn of the Eighties, when Sonic Youth could only dream of what they would eventually go on to build. But it's the whole setlist, as well as its execution, that proves truly outstanding, a band showing itself in great shape on stage, managing for an hour and a half to rise above any internal friction. The three most recent songs, “Sacred Trickster”, “Calming The Snake” and “What We Know”, also hold up well, proof that Sonic Youth were anything but spent, even in terms of songwriting, something they would go on to demonstrate afterward too, giving rise to four solo paths that were never dull and full of thrilling moments.

In February 2024, Walls Have Ears became an official Sonic Youth release, a reissue of a bootleg originally circulated in 1986, a selection of tracks drawn from three concerts held on English soil in 1985, during the promotional tour for “Bad Moon Rising”, before they finished writing the songs that would end up on “EVOL”, some of which had already been road-tested live. The strictly lo-fi recording helps make Sonic Youth's sonic anarchy even more claustrophobic. The running order of the tracks is anti-chronological: the first part of the record is devoted to the show held in London on October 30, while the second half collects extracts from an earlier show, from April 1985, an opening act for Nick Cave at the Hammersmith Palais, also in London.

Behind the drums sat Bob Bert, not yet replaced by Steve Shelley, and it's possible to compare the two drummers' styles by listening to three songs drawn from both sets: “Death Valley '69” (at one point disguised under the title “Spahn Ranch Dance”), “Brother James” and “Kill Yr. Idols” (it's the one listed as “Killed And Kicked Off”, which closes the tracklist). In between, just one track has been inserted from a further show held in Brighton on November 8. Of poorer sound quality, “Blood On Brighton Beach” actually conceals a “Making The Nature Scene” awash in distortion and atonal tunings.

The intense solo activity of Thurston, Kim, Lee and Steve over these years hasn't made the absence of new Sonic Youth material weigh too heavily, if anything, the sheer abundance and variety of what each has released separately – often the result of cross-collaborations – has in some ways made it almost possible to forget that the band no longer exists. But the desire to see them together again remains enormous, and, as both Ranaldo and Shelley confided to us in two interviews they gave us, even they themselves can't rule out that it might happen, sooner or later. Sonic Youth is their life, not just the life of their most devoted fans.

Monograph edited by:

 – Raffaello Russo (“Sister”, “Washing Machine”, “A Thousand Leaves”, “NYC Ghosts & Flowers”, “The Eternal”); 

 – Francesco Nunziata (“Kill Yr Idols”, “Bad Moon Rising”, “EVOL”, “Made in USA”, “Master Dik”);

 – Claudio Lancia (“The Destroyed Room. B-Sides And Rarities”, “Spinhead Sessions”, “Battery Park, NYC”, “In/Out/In”, “Live In Brooklyn 2011”, “Walls Have Ears”).

Other Contributions:

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