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Who shaped them

Sonic Youth

Sonic Youth

Since 1981 · United States

Sonic Youth are the permanent avant-garde of American rock… Their story

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Who they shaped

Behind them, left to right: Faust, Wire, Rhys Chatham, The Stooges, New York Dolls, Black Flag, This Heat, Minor Threat, Leonard Cohen, DNA, Mars, Minutemen, Neil Young, Television, James Chance and the Contortions, The Velvet Underground, Patti Smith, Talking Heads, Glenn Branca, Joni Mitchell, Pavement, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks.

In front, left to right: beabadoobee, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Mogwai, Ride, Bark Psychosis, Sleater-Kinney, Mono, Sweet Trip, My Bloody Valentine, ...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead, Slowdive, Drive Like Jehu. And 15 more: Pavement, Brand New, Dinosaur Jr., Blur, Black Tambourine, Unwound, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Pixies, Liz Phair, The Microphones / Mount Eerie, Nirvana, St. Vincent, Kurt Vile, The Knife, Beck.

Not in the photo: , . Often assumed; they've said no.

The bigger the face, the stronger the proof: they said it themselvesreporteda critic, or widely accepted

Daydream Nation cover

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Daydream Nation (1988)

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Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo's guitars operate as a single extended system rather than rhythm/lead — two instruments creating interlocking drone and harmonic fields that the rhythm section navigates through rather than anchors — and the double album's seventy-plus minutes give that system room to develop in real time. 'Teen Age Riot' opens as the most fully formed example, a slow-building eight-minute piece with a guitar coda that sounds like two different songs playing simultaneously; Ranaldo's 'Eric's Trip' is the album's most purely emotional moment. It legitimized noise rock as high art in the eyes of the critical establishment — giving Sonic Youth a reputation that their major-label work both expanded and slightly complicated.

Sleeve notes

Sonic Youth

Daydream Nation · 1988

Sonic Youth are the permanent avant-garde of American rock: a band that spent four decades maintaining an experimental program — altered tunings, noise elements, free improvisation — inside the form of the rock band, never entirely surrendering the formal ambitions even when they signed to a major label and tried to make accessible records. Daydream Nation (1988), their double LP, is the canonical statement: nine tracks of alternately lyrical and confrontational guitar music, moving between beauty and something that is actively the opposite of beauty with complete fluency.

Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo had, between them, worked out an approach to the guitar — extended techniques, retuned to the point of non-correspondence with standard notation, played with drumsticks and other non-plectrum objects — that produced sounds with no precedent in rock music. Kim Gordon's bass and vocal were a different kind of presence: more confrontational, more politically intentional, the source of some of the band's most important statements. Their influence is not just on noise-rock and underground guitar music; it runs through the entire alternative ecosystem.

Since 1981 · United States

Played at

SST Records

Los Angeles · 1978–1990

On the bill

New York outsiders who toured the SST circuit despite no California roots; Lee Ranaldo has voiced admiration for Black Flag, more a mark of the label's camaraderie than a direct sound-influence claim.

The whole scene