Sonic Youth

In the 70s / 80s, New York is bubbling. The city is a landmark of artists of all kinds, the place of all excesses but also of intense creation. Sonic Youth's story begins a little after Thurston Moore's arrival in New York in the late 1970s. A great fan of punk, the young man joined several groups, met Glenn Branca and all the great names of what was then called the No Wave. This is where Sonic Youth was born in 1981. Their creed is to redefine how to make rock by playing with ‘free' tunes, even going so far as to modify their instruments to alter their stamp. In the end, it is a fairly similar approach to that of the Free Jazz experimenters of the New York underground of the previous decades, we find at Sonic Youth this same desire to conquer a certain form of freedom and to free up a heavy orthodoxy. Branca had them signed in 1981 on Neutral Records, allowing them to release a mini album of the same name in 1982 and Confusion is Sex in 1983. The band then enjoyed a very good popularity in New York where they performed intensely during this period. Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon get married in 1984, a year that will also see the release of their second album (or third with the eponymous album), Bad Moon Rising, where their friend Lydia Lunch (an icon of N.Y.'s counter culture punk) is pushing the song on "Death Valley 69". The album blows them up in Europe, in the UK especially where they sell 5,000 copies in a few months. The drummer of the time, Bob Burt, exhausted from playing Bad Moon Rising on stage every night or almost for months, ends up leaving the band. He was quickly replaced by Steve Shelley of the Crucifucks. This is the group's quasi-definitive line-up, which will not move until Jim's arrival from 2000 to 2005. Fascinated by the Californian SST label catalogue (at the time especially Black Flag , Minutemen , Hüsker Dü or Subhumans ), Sonic Youth will end up signing with them for two albums, EVOL , in which Mike Watt of Minutemen participates just after the death of D. Boon of the same band, and Sister , largely inspired by the work of K. Dick. After getting involved in court with the latter (for obscure reasons of payment), the band signed for an album on Enigma. The double album Daydream Nation was released in 1988 (on two vinyls at the time). The album marks the consecration of Sonic Youth in the level of criticism, unanimous. It is considered by Rolling Stone magazine as one of the greatest albums of the decade. But the distribution by Capitol Records is very bad, as long as it is hard to find in stores even in the largest cities. It was the end of Sonic Youth's indecent period that signed with Major Geffen to release Goo in 1990. The band was filmed in 1991 with Nirvana and can be seen in the famous 1991 documentary: The Year Punk Broke. In 1992 Dirty was released on ECG. Kim and Thurston's first daughter, Coco Hayley Gordon Moore, was born in 1994, the same year as Experimental Jet Set, Trash and no Star. The break comes in a big pump with Washing Machine, an album with which the group has put both feet in a much more pop orientation. Since the early 1990s, Sonic Youth has regularly released and under its own label Sonic Youth Recordings a collection of experimental records, the SYR series, impossible to release on a major. The band is now back on an indie label, Matador, and is expected to release its fourteenth album, The Eternal, in 2009.