Sonic Youth
The Destroyed Room B-Sides And Rarities
2025 stock The Destroyed Room: B-sides And Rarities, a band-chosen collection of near-hidden Sonic Youth gems. The album brings together songs from throughout the band's career with Geffen, focusing on tracks previously available only on vinyl, limited-release compilations, or as b-sides to international singles. The tracks were hand picked by the band and also include material that has never before been released.
Hold That Tiger
CD Edition. Sonic Youth on Superior Viaduct!!! In October 1987, four months after the release of their critically acclaimed Sister LP, Sonic Youth showcased their latest work in a blistering set at Cabaret Metro, Chicago. The concert was introduced by Big Black's Steve Albini (who at the time was banned from the venue) and subsequently released as a semi-official bootleg under the title Hold That Tiger on writer/provocateur Byron Coley's impishly Geffen-baiting label Goofin' (years later the ban…
Sonic Youth
Recorded in late 1981 at Radio City Music Hall and originally released on Glenn Branca's Neutral label, this remastered and expanded vinyl reissue includes the self-titled debut record plus live material from '81 and a track from a previously unheard studio session. Includes liner notes by original Sonic Youth drummer Richard Edson, Glenn Branca and Byron Coley.
Goodbye 20th Century
25th Anniversary Edition. Goodbye 20th Century is a double album of covers of Avant-garde recordings by Sonic Youth and collaborators. SYR4 features works by avant-garde classical composers such as John Cage, Yoko Ono, Steve Reich, and Christian Wolff played by Sonic Youth along with several collaborators from the modern avant-garde music scene, such as Christian Marclay, William Winant, Wharton Tiers, Takehisa Kosugi and others. The album received mixed reviews, but most critics praised the gro…
Walls Have Ears
Double LP version. Color vinyl. "Culled from three 1985 gigs in the UK during a transitional and transcendent time in the band's story, Sonic Youth's The Walls Have Ears appeared/disappeared as a 2LP set in 1986, not just a live album but an artful tapestry full of live experimentation with songs, between-song tape segues, darkness, humor and audio verité. It's now issued for the first time officially under the band's auspices.""The '85 shows were the second time the band appeared on UK soil, Br…
Anagrama
BACK IN PRINT ON VINYL! While 1995's Washing Machine LP moniker was a thinly-veiled jab at the corporate aesthetic ("no, you cannot turn Sonic Youth into a household appliance brand", the band even considered changing its name to Washing Machine but settled on the album title instead), their major label relationship was indeed a curious buzzpoint of talk on the street after their intake to DGC in 1990. It wouldn't be fair to say that this state of existence propelled the band to reinforce its i…
Invito Al Cielo
For the third of Sonic Youth's sound experiment series, they teamed up with legendary nosie-nik Jim O'Rourke. Building on the ideas from the brilliant extended version of "The Diamond Sea" (from Washing Machine); the series explores the (mostly) instrumental side of the band. Though sold as an EP, the three tracks on the CD version of clock in at just over 56 minutes, and can sit quite comfortably with any of SY's best work.
The title track opens the record with over 20 minutes of drenching feed…
Confusion Is Sex
Originally slated to be a seven-inch single to follow up their self-titled debut, Sonic Youth ’s Confusion Is Sex blossomed into the band’s first album: a brain-bludgeoning, completely fried endeavor of dissonance and disarray, a perfect soundtrack for running from a chain-wielding gang near the SIN Club. This was the sound of 1983 New York City: nothing like London where punks were starting to scrub their faces and sounds to get on Top of the Pops , and nothing like the jangly roots of college…
Sister
Received a 9.8 rating on Pitchfork. “Let’s get something straight. There is no album in the entire corpus of indie rock—not Loveless, not Surfer Rosa, not Psychocandy—that reaches the heights of invention, joy, and magic of Sonic Youth’s sublime fifth album.... The haunted reveries of Sister remain with you for years, even if you only hear them once…. Sister is the sonic manifestation of refracted light. It’s a record that changes you.” —Stereogum
One of Sonic Youth’s most beloved albums, 19…
Simon Werner A Disparu
In Spring 2010, Sonic Youth gathered at their Echo Canyon West studio in Hoboken, New Jersey, to watch the rushes of a new film, Simon Werner a Disparu, by French director Fabrice Gobert. They spent the following few weeks recording music which was then shaped as needed to fit the various scenes. For this release, rather than present the small clips of music as used in the film, the band went back in the autumn to the original tapes and re-organized the various pieces for this original soundtrac…
Bad Moon Rising
Sonic Youth’s second full-length LP Bad Moon Rising was originally released on Homestead and Blast First in 1985. The album is a fascinating examination of “the junction where hippie idealism [meets] the cold hard world,” says guitarist Lee Ranaldo, “where Woodstock [meets] Altamont—Death Valley, Charles Manson, Brian Wilson, musicians, murderers, heroes and villains.” Its original eight-song tapestry of droning guitar feedback, distant clattering percussion, and sullen vocals, all held together…
Spinhead Sessions 1986
" The slow-burn sounds of Sonic Youth’s 1986 rehearsals to score Ken Friedman’s spooky highway film Made In USA are yet another mile marker in the band’s long and varied existence, now being issued as Spinhead Sessions (named for the North Hollywood studio used by SST label acts like Black Flag and Painted Willie). These jams were later built upon for a full-on (and quite different) soundtrack production, but the rough sketches here find the band taking time with truly new and introspective so…
EVOL
"EVOL" was Sonic Youth's fourth album, significant for one fairly obvious reason: the addition of Steve Shelley behind the kit. Steve joined the band in mid 1985, and this is the first album he plays on. EVOL also features the first real "guest appearance" on a Sonic Youth album -- Mike Watt, who contributes bass to "In The Kingdom #19" and the non-LP bonus track "Bubblegum". "Shadow Of A Doubt" became their second music video. At some point circa June 1985, after the first European Bad Moon Ris…
Slaapkamers Met Slagroom
The Dutch title that literally translates to "Bedrooms with Whipped Cream" and harkens back to the band's experimental days. On three tracks spread over 28 minutes, Sonic Youth work out extended, hypnotic themes for non-existent psychological case studies. The title track, the longest of the three "songs" included here, opens with a swirl of sound before eventually settling into a 17 minute cavalcade of guitar effects overlaying a particularly "in-your-face" drum sound. The results are simultane…
J’accuse Ted Hughes
Another great installment in Sonic Youth's SYR series, this one features two engrossing, lengthy pieces : 'J'Accuse Ted Hughes' and 'Agnes B Musique'. The former was recorded at All Tomorrow's Parties 2001, when the band were premiering material from their NYC Ghosts & Flowers album, and takes the form of a ragged twenty-two minute noise jam featuring free association lyrics by Kim Gordon ("I sent my poem to Good Housekeeping. They paid me ten dollars" she imparts). Meanwhile, the more composed,…