Every Sonic Youth album, ranked worst to best

In hindsight, it feels like we eventually took Sonic Youth a bit for granted. By the time of the band’s implosion following the very public divorce of bassist Kim Gordon and guitarist Thurston Moore in 2011, there had been almost a decade of records in which the band’s pioneering—and ever-evolving—mix of avant-garde noise with radio-friendly rock and roll was received with the acclaim generally reserved for artists seen as bedrock pillars of a musical community that have nothing more to prove. As The A.V. Club put it in , “doesn’t mark an epochal moment for Sonic Youth, but its familiar nods and new ingredients… stake out another high point.” In other words: Good job, keep doing what you’re doing, etc.But just as nobody ever expects the day to arrive when they don’t immediately rush to hear a new album from their favorite band, no one can anticipate the end of a group that felt like it would always be around—had always been around, somehow, in the collective unconscious of a million indie-rock obsessives who felt in Sonic Youth the musical and aesthetic pull of counter-cultural cool. The band, even as brash young upstarts coming of age in the no-wave scene of downtown Manhattan in the ’80s, always came across like intimidating but inspiring older siblings, introducing shy midwestern nerds and coastal outsiders alike to the radical possibilities of rock music fused with the experimental avant-garde—and a healthy dose of punk. Unless you were Robert Christgau, issuing edicts on the state of American music from a typewriter in The Village Voice office, Sonic Youth came across like they had something to teach you, and it was gonna be thrilling.So when the long-running outfit called it quits over a decade ago, it felt like we were losing a group we hadn’t sufficiently embraced in recent years. The band members’ roles as elder statesman, combined with the stolid consistency of quality in its musical output, made it too easy for fans to just accept Sonic Youth’s presence in the pop-culture firmament without properly appreciating what it could still bring to the avant-rock table. As writer , it’s the Curse Of Being Very Good: “At a certain point, you get tired of eating the same lunch every day, even if that lunch is FILET MIGNON (widely recognized as the finest lunch there is). This is the curse of being filet mignon.”Sonic Youth was just about the most badass filet mignon imaginable. Watch any scene from 1991: The Year Punk Broke, the sometimes satirical documentary of the band’s European tour with openers Nirvana, and try to imagine a world in which impressionable alt-rock youth wouldn’t want to spend as much time as possible soaking up the wit, weirdness, and musical chops of all four of them, even wallflower-anonymous drummer Steve Shelley (arguably responsible for making sure the world heard Cat Power for the first time, among other commendable acts). Whatever “cool” actually means, rest assured, it included Sonic Youth. And with the release this week of In/Out/In, a collection of unreleased music from the band’s final 10 years, it’s a good time to remember that fact.But which Sonic Youth was the best? Throughout its three-decade existence, the group’s sound underwent multiple transformations—sometimes as part of a cultural zeitgeist redefining contemporary rock, at other points an insular recalibration far removed from the confines of the “alternative music” charts. And yet the signature sounds retained some surprising consistency across the years; there are moments on 1985’s Bad Moon Rising not so far removed from the churning beauty of the band’s 2009 swan song, The Eternal. It’s part of what made it so indelible: Even while forever pushing the boundaries of genres and sounds, every song remained stubbornly, and instantly, recognizable as Sonic Youth.To truly trace the arc of its music from the finest to the slightly less fine, a few parameters were necessary. This list only includes albums considered part of the band’s canon of studio releases, meaning the records Sonic Youth put out as part of its free-to-experiment-and-improvise label, SYR, aren’t included. (This includes the variety of EPs and soundtracks put to tape over the years, though not the first EP, as we’ll explain below.) That also goes for the playful one-off release The Whitey Album: yes, it’s the band members making music together, but look right there on the cover—different name, different project. Consider it the Facebook/Winklevoss rule: If it were a Sonic Youth album, it’d be a Sonic Youth album. And while The Destroyed Room and other compilation releases contain some excellent music, they weren’t conceived as albums, and are therefore disqualified.Still, that leaves 16 albums’ worth of music to absorb, from the earliest days of lo-fi magic to the zenith of commercial polish during the alt-rock heyday. (Though, as always with Sonic Youth, “commercial polish” should be graded on quite the sliding scale.) Read on to see where we ranked each record, and if at any point you disagree (why would you?), just remember that Thurston Moore probably shares your contradictory opinion—after all, he thinks the best songs Sonic Youth ever wrote .”[Note to desktop users: If you’d like to read this in a scrolling format, simply narrow your browser window.]

Yes, it’s technically considered an EP—but it never was by the band itself. The earliest iteration of Sonic Youth, with original drummer Richard Edson, went into the studio in late 1981 and recorded what they considered, by any metric, to be an album. That it ended up being under 25 minutes long—and thus more marketable as an EP—is beside the point; this is the group’s initial outing on a studio record. And while there are plenty of indications of the noise to come, it’s also still far too beholden to the post-punk, no-wave sounds of the day, directives that the band surpassed as soon as it shook them off. Side one track “I Dreamed I Dream” still rules, but it’s clearly a band struggling to find its sound. Just the fact that the guitars are almost uniformly in standard tuning throughout should tell you that this is proto-Sonic Youth, if the occasionally funky (!) basslines didn’t make it clear. This is a completists-only affair.

This is where we start getting somewhere. Yes, the rhythm section (with drummer Jim Sclavunos, the second of three before Shelley joined) is still far too beholden to the post-punk trappings of the day, and the atonal elements extend well into the vocals, in ways that can negatively affect even promising tracks like thumper “The World Looks Red.” But the sounds that would help the band rise above its contemporaries are starting to take shape, with the strange, slow builds of oddly tuned guitars and cathartic rush of noise freakouts that would continue to evolve throughout Sonic Youth’s existence. Plus, the live cover of The Stooges’ “I Wanna Be Your Dog”—the real draw of otherwise forgettable feedback exercise “Freezer Burn”—hints at the exhilarating blend of noise and rock that would eventually become the band’s métier. It’s not the smoothest start-to-finish listen, but it’s on its way.

Sometimes, a project just doesn’t work out. In some ways, there’s nothing that strange about NYC Ghosts & Flowers; the recurring beat-poet vocals and hippie-groove arrangements have always existed on the periphery of Sonic Youth’s music. But what was once an occasional trick to be pulled out of the band’s arsenal here became the dominant force, to diminished results. Some of this was the result of circumstances: The theft of most of their equipment in 1999, including essentially irreplaceable guitars and pedals, forced the members to rethink how they went about composing music from the distorted ground on up.At times, this new process results in intriguing soundscapes that blossom out of otherwise lackadaisical compositions, such as the haunting ending of “Renegade Princess,” or when the back half of the title track gets cooking like one of guitarist Lee Renaldo’s classic offerings, catchy and dissonant in equal measure. But mostly, it sounds like a band caught off-guard and forced to improvise, only sporadically capturing the magic they normally found with ease. However, it does mark the beginning of the band’s relationship with musician and producer Jim O’Rourke, who would go on to join as a full-time member for the next two albums. If only it offered more reasons to get excited about that soon-to-be-fruitful pairing.

There’s something deeply thrilling about the first time hearing “I Love Her All The Time,” a seven-plus minute exercise in fusing avant-garde minimalism, sound-collage experimentation, and slow-build majesty. It’s the kind of thing that shouldn’t work, but does: a song that mostly rides a single note, before exploding into a cacophony of inspired, can-you-top-this musical expressionism that presages things like Nirvana’s “Endless, Nameless” with anticipatory elan. The last track on side one of Sonic Youth’s first great record fumes and sizzles with unpredictable energy.If only the whole album could meet that level of quality. There’s no real duds among this bunch of songs—a record about the American obsession with romancing death, the confectioner’s allure of pop culture and pain, and as dark as anything the band made before or since. But the bleak “road trip on hard drugs” vibe can only sustain for the duration of the album, a listen that is rewarding, but exhausting. It’s a testament to the way challenging art rock can both productively push boundaries and hit the limits of same.

At the time of its release, Washing Machine was praised for flying in the face of the mid-’90s trend toward louder, faster, and bigger—a record that stepped away from the noisy hooks and churning rush of alt-rock tendencies. And while that’s true, in retrospect, it’s also just less fun. Experimental Jet Set, Trash And No Star had already made that pivot, and to better effect—the songs here occasionally have the skronk of half-formed ideas getting the good-enough treatment, meandering and wandering with a level of self-indulgence that made them longer but not much better. And when they did have a strong foundation—such as “No Queen Blues” or opening track “Becuz”—the music never progresses beyond that initial kick.That being said, it also possesses a few wonderful songs that can go toe-to-toe with anything in the Sonic Youth catalogue. “Little Trouble Girl” is a winning embrace of ’60s girl-group harmony of the Shangri-Las variety, and “Saucer-Like” reveals one of the more gorgeous psychedelica soundscapes Renaldo has ever contributed. And the closing number, the nearly 20-minute “The Diamond Sea,” is a lodestone in the band’s set, a swooning epic of languid beauty that never stops impressing throughout. It’s an album of interesting ideas delivered with uneven execution.

Speaking of uneven execution—A Thousand Leaves is the sound of Sonic Youth truly not giving a fuck what might be expected from them. Left alone to work in their own newly built downtown New York studio with no real deadline, the band went exploring. The results? With the exception of catchy, engaging grooves like “Sunday,” this might be the most inaccessible Sonic Youth album since the early days. That’s not necessarily a bad thing (see: the nine-minute “Wildflower Soul,” building on a jam-band groove of wah-wah dissonance), but it also doesn’t make for a terribly cohesive album. It feels like the product of four musicians chasing their muses without finding an endpoint. It had been three years since the last album—the longest stretch of time the group had waited between records since its inception—and it was simultaneously recording the experimental releases for its own SYR label. Maybe it was just too much of a good thing, having all that time.

Sonic Nurse is a strange one in the Sonic Youth discography. Not because it’s not good; it’s actually quite good, maybe one of the band’s more undervalued releases. No, what makes it unusual is how oddly it sits between the records that immediately preceded and followed it. It’s practically the definition of a “grower”: the group hadn’t yet perfected the mellow majesty of Rather Ripped, and it hadn’t fully set aside the beat-poet funkiness of its millennial anxiety. A more apt title might be Murray Street II: an album that continues the late-period creative renaissance of the band, while starting to rediscover some of the noisy rock riffing that had made its early-’90s output so exuberant.That sense of rock ’n’ roll excitement announces itself right away on “Pattern Recognition,” with Gordon crying “You’re the one!” as a drumroll coasts behind her and guitars and bass fluctuate in and out of recognizable keys. It’s almost like the band is winking at its former existence before blowing it apart—first with the mellow sweetness of “Unmade Bed,” and then with the slow shuffle of “Dude Nurse Ranch.” It eventually overstays its welcome (especially the awkward and lyrically clunky “Dripping Dream”), but overall a much better record than it tends to get credit for being.

Anyone who has ever questioned the essential nature of drummer Steve Shelley to Sonic Youth’s sound, look no further. This was the first record on which the ex-Crucifucks percussionist plays, and the leap forward in musical evolution is no coincidence. Whether it’s the rolling toms on opener “Tom Violence,” or the unexpected start-stop beat of “Starpower,” Shelley brought a vital new energy to not just the rhythm section, but the entire feel of the music.That being said, it’s also around the time that Renaldo, Moore, and Gordon really found their voices as songwriters. Each of their contributions here showcases their respective strengths, be it Gordon’s art-damaged, breathy vocal command, Moore’s newly discovered powers in fusing melodic accessibility to his riffing, or Renaldo’s psych-meets-beat groove, this is where it all first came together. Together with the next two albums Sister and Daydream Nation, this remains the beginning of one of their high-water marks, creatively.

It’s almost shocking just how much ass Sonic Youth’s final album kicks. After a decade that saw the band really segueing into a gentler, more exploratory vibe of jam-band grooves and mellower expressions of its arty tendencies, something lit a fire under them. Maybe it was returning to an indie label (Matador) after almost two decades with Geffen Records; maybe it was the addition of ex-Pavement bassist Mark Ibold, allowing Gordon to pick up an axe and create some fierce three-guitar assaults; maybe it was acclaimed indie-rock producer John Agnello, helping to lend the songs a bright, accessible sheen. Whatever the results, the results rock for themselves.From the opener “Sacred Trickster” on through to stunner of a closer “Massage The History,” the album hearkens back more to the band’s early Geffen era of Goo and Dirty than to immediate predecessor Rather Ripped. True, it does feel like a throwback in that sense, rather than marking any bold new territory (though songs like “Anti-Orgasm” and “Calming The Snake” segue into dreamy new arenas, sounding almost like Air or Stereolab at times), but that doesn’t lessen the potency of the music a whit. If you’re going to go out, go out hard—and that’s what The Eternal does.

Let’s just go ahead and say it: Murray Street might be a better post-9/11 album than The Rising. Nothing against the Boss, but the post-punk squalls and psychedelic jams of downtown Manhattan’s best art-rock spokespeople better capture the strangeness, sadness, and rebellious resistance of the NYC scene in the aftermath of tragedy way better than Springsteen’s love letter to his neighboring city. Yes, some of it was written before that day (recording was literally halted in the middle of the project when the towers fell, to be resumed months later). But it echoes and bubbles with the sense of loss—and joyful reclamation of hope—in a way that few other records at the time managed to embody.Some of that sense of rebirth was the effect of shaking off the doldrums of NYC Ghosts & Flowers: From the explosion of noise that rips open halfway through leadoff track “The Empty Page,” it feels as though the record is nodding goodbye to the open-ended wanna-beat poetry of that record. Spacey and engaging, it combines the sing-song-y dreamscape vibe of the previous few records (though “Disconnection Notice” almost directly lifts the riff from Experimental Jet Set’s “Skink,” albeit to great effect) with the more mellow-meets-noise sensibility that would define the next decade of the band.

“Smells Like Teen Spirit” got all the attention, but take a listen to the opening moments of “100%,” the first song on Sonic Youth’s Dirty, and see if it doesn’t herald a new era of rawer, more ambitious rock music in mainstream culture as effectively as Nirvana’s game-changing hit. Listening to it now, it still elicits goosebumps, as does much of the record that follows. This was the time when Sonic Youth was riding at the forefront of a musical revolution in pop culture, one the band itself had helped usher in. And with Dirty, it pulled out all the stops: Glossy production values (courtesy of Nevermind’s helmer and mixer Butch Vig and Andy Wallace) applied to pointed and ferocious rock songs, resulting in some of the most accessible music of the band’s career.And what songs they were. Roaming freely between ethereal beauty like “Theresa’s Sound-World” and four-on-the-floor stompers like “Youth Against Fascism,” between the electric rush that cascades over the chorus of Renaldo’s “Wish Fulfillment” and the ambling, last-call intensity of “JC,” this was a record that showcased the band’s many strengths in a something-for-everyone stab at crossover success. That it never quite attained that goal almost adds to the glitzy allure of its squalling, feedback-drenched mania. If the indie rock-loving teen in your life is asking where to start with Sonic Youth, hand them Dirty.

Right from the start, Sonic Youth’s follow-up to its biggest commercial success announces its intention to secede from Alternative Nation™. “Winner’s Blues” is a minute and a half of gently strummed acoustic guitar and Moore’s laid-back voice, worlds away from the explosive squeals of “100%.” From there, the band travels through a series of more restrained, thoughtful songs, more interested in poking at the quieter moments of its songcraft than exploding them.The results speak for themselves, with a collection of songs about as good as could be imagined for a group intent on dissociating itself from the bombast of what “alternative rock” was quickly becoming. With the exception of a few churning numbers like “Screaming Skull” and “In The Mind Of The Bourgeois Reader,” the record mostly focuses on minor-key grooves and strumming melancholy, yet never once comes across as downbeat. There’s a complete lack of Renaldo’s songs, stemming from his dissatisfaction at their handling during Dirty’s production, but the group sounds like it’s firing on all oddly tuned cylinders, a quieter record that nonetheless speaks more loudly in hindsight than many of its more aggressive contemporaries. (Plus, “Bull In The Heather” has a real claim for one of the best songs the band has ever written.)

Sometimes, going back to basics elicits something far more enthralling than even those choosing to do the stripping back could have anticipated. Rather Ripped is a mild masterpiece, a collection of mellow, relaxed songs that nonetheless retain a precise and exacting structure of pop perfection, as though the listener was hearing John Cage trying to write Beatles songs. To hear it start to finish is to hear a band rediscovering what made them so indelible—an attraction to pop’s need for earworm melodies meeting the anti-institutional preference for avant-garde weirdness.That combination is clear in nearly every song, across an album that is almost certainly the most consistent of the band’s career. Every song feels of a piece with the ones around it, even Renaldo’s signature spoken-word poet moments on “Rats.” It has hooks for days—something that even Sonic Youth’s most die-hard defenders wouldn’t acknowledge about many of its albums—and the genteel sensibility somehow makes it more compelling, rather than lethargic. The departure of Jim O’Rourke energized the core members; it’s the sound of a stellar band stumbling upon a new, winning formula late in the game, and making the most of it.

Is there an album more beloved by Sonic Youth aficionados than Sister? Released just prior to the band’s arrival on the international stage of critical acclaim, it still features many of the same hallmarks as the more popularly known Daydream Nation. And that’s with good reason: From the opening thump of “Schizophrenia,” on through to the pummeling catharsis of “Stereo Sanctity” and frenetic stuttering of closer “White Kross,” this is the sound of a band announcing its intentions to the world—specifically, its intention to bend it into submission.It’s only the randomness of underground culture’s scrum that kept this from being Sonic Youth’s bis breakout moment. The songwriting is unparalleled; the aesthetic remains cooler than anything you could imagine this side of an early Jim Jarmusch movie. And it even has a moment of full-throated punk rock absurdity in “Hotwire My Heart,” a cover so good, it didn’t matter that it technically sounded almost nothing like Sonic Youth up until then; very soon, it would.

Daydream Nation casts a long shadow. Across the band’s entire career and discography; across the changing nature of the American underground music scene in the late ’80s; across the bow of mainstream attention and the sound of then-contemporary rock music; and that’s just on the macro scale. (The Library Of Congress also added it to the National Recording Registry in 2006.) The number of kids who picked up an instrument after hearing “Teen Age Riot” is hard to quantify, but you’d be hard-pressed to find a guitar-based alternative rock band in the ’90s that didn’t at least tip its cap to the influence of this album.But forget about the accolades. Forget about its high ranking on the lists of “best albums of the 1980s” by everyone from to . Instead, just listen to this ambitious double album, start to finish, and marvel at the synthesis of everything exciting in rock music, from pummeling punk to feedback-drenched avant-garde noise to pop hooks and rich soundscapes of instrumentation, all filtered through the laser-focused talent of four musicians bringing out the best in one another. It was ineffably cool, yes, but it was also momentous—the sound of genre-smashing reinvention, happening in front of our eyes. And ears.