Sonic Youth formed in 1981, but their legacy as we know it today really started to get written five years later, when the band became a flagship act on SST Records—then the premier label in the American underground—and released the art-punk masterwork EVOL. It was also the era when drummer Steve Shelley joined the group, adding a more propulsive rhythmic thrust that would guide the band’s music for decades to come. And it marked the moment when Sonic Youth received the ultimate validation that they were reaching a wider audience: They discovered the first bootleg bearing their name.
“We were not happy to see it,” guitarist Lee Ranaldo recounts during a recent Zoom call with Shelley. But it wasn’t the existence of the illicit live recording that bothered them—after all, Ranaldo came of age as a tape-trading Deadhead—but the fact that it was leaked into the marketplace in a semi-official capacity by their own UK manager at the time, without the band’s knowledge. “We were totally blindsided,” Shelley adds.
Nearly 40 years later, Ranaldo and Shelley acknowledge the record in question, Walls Have Ears, has acquired a mythic status in Sonic Youth lore, capturing that crucial transitory period where the group’s no-wave roots blossomed into a more expansive avant-rock vision. And as Sonic Youth’s popularity continued to rise from the late-’80s onward, the bootlegs continued to proliferate. But rather than see them a nuisance, the group embraced these unofficial recordings as valuable documentation of a band constantly in flux.
“We always made it clear to venues that people coming in with tape recorders were OK by us and that they shouldn’t be harassed in any way,” Ranaldo says. “We’d just ask for our own copies.”
Now, after decades of accumulation, Sonic Youth have been turning their private archive into a public good. In 2020, the group launched a Bandcamp page, which has been overflowing with all manner of authorized bootlegs ever since. And this month sees the release of the first official Sonic Youth record in over 10 years, In/Out/In, a compilation of largely unheard, mostly instrumental pieces recorded during the 2000s. For a band that’s been dormant for over a decade, Sonic Youth are pretty busy. And they’re showing how a defunct group can still actively engage with their fans, expand their footprint, and continue to exert a positive influence, even when the prospect of a proper reunion seems evermore remote.
When a band breaks up after 30 years together, it’s usually motivated by a desire to step away from the rigors of life on the road, or by the realization that the creative well has run dry. But Sonic Youth weren’t beset by such afflictions—they broke up because their guitarist and bassist did. In October 2011, Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon revealed that their marriage of 27 years was ending; a month later, Sonic Youth performed what would prove to be their final show in Sao Paulo. As the messy details of the divorce became public over the subsequent years, Sonic Youth joined the Smiths and Talking Heads in the rarefied realm of defunct alt-rock legends whose members are all still alive, but who will likely never play together again, no matter how big the payday.
Since the split, the members of Sonic Youth have never strayed far from view. Moore decamped to London, where he’s recorded a string of very SY-like solo releases with his eponymous group. The L.A.-based Gordon formed the noise duo Body/Head and embarked on her own electro-driven solo escapades. Still holding it down in Sonic Youth’s native New York, Ranaldo has used his records to explore Beat-inspired spins on classic-rock melodicism. And proud New Jerseyite Shelley has bounced between Moore and Ranaldo’s projects while serving as a drummer-for-hire for the likes of M. Ward, Sun Kil Moon, and Land of Talk, among others. All the while, Sonic Youth’s influence continues to permeate the indie-rock world, through bands like Dry Cleaning, black midi, and Porridge Radio. And at this point, Goo shirts, whether genuine or memefied, have essentially become the aging-hipster equivalent of a Rolling Stones tongue tee.
But in recent years, Shelley and Ranaldo have been putting in extra work to make Sonic Youth as active as an inactive band can be. Of course, as anyone who’s purchased a Black Flag onesie can tell you, Sonic Youth are hardly the first band to maintain a robust presence long after they’ve disbanded. And they’re certainly not the first to authorize bootlegs for fans to enjoy. But where groups like Fugazi and Pearl Jam have taken a completist approach to presenting their archives, Sonic Youth are offering a more curated experience, posting shows that document the crucial evolutions that were happening onstage between their studio albums.
According to Ranaldo, there was no real strategy to managing the band’s legacy in the wake of their demise. (“Sonic Youth? Strategy?” he jokes.) But over time, a division of labor naturally developed. Ranaldo has played a hands-on role in building the archive by directly reaching out to fans to source recordings, photos, and flyers. Shelley, meanwhile, is the one who’ll listen to every last bootleg and determine if it’s worth sharing with the rest of the band for release consideration. Alongside their official back catalog, Sonic Youth have posted no fewer than 25 live sets to their Bandcamp page over the last two years, each one aiming to showcase a particularly emblematic moment of their creative past. “Each tour had a different character to it,” Ranaldo says, “so the idea was to find a recording that was really representative of the Daydream Nation period, or the Washing Machine period, and so on.”
As heard throughout the archive, Sonic Youth were never a band to trot out a predictable setlist of fan favorites. They often performed material well in advance of its proper release—check the May 1987 performance at City Gardens in Trenton, New Jersey, where the crowd hears songs from the epochal Sister for the first time, or an infamous set from the April 2000 edition of All Tomorrow’s Parties that starts with a 23-minute version of an experimental piece, “J’Accuse Ted Hughes,” that wouldn’t officially surface for another eight years. Beyond granting fans the opportunity to hear now-familiar material with fresh ears, Sonic Youth’s Bandcamp archive also abounds with all sorts of hidden gems from the vaults, like the exclusive Rarities compilations of out-of-print tracks, and an entire lost album from the Wylde Ratttz, the indie supergroup featuring Moore and Shelley that formed for director Todd Haynes’ 1998 glam drama, Velvet Goldmine.
Sonic Youth’s Bandcamp binge follows a smaller bootleg bonanza unveiled in 2018 on Nugs.net, a concert-streaming site popular among the classic-rock and jam-band communities. But Shelley and Ranaldo found themselves more spiritually in tune with the DIY ethos of Bandcamp, which, over the past decade, has emerged as the platonic ideal of an ethical, artist-focused music marketplace, with 82 per cent of the sticker price going directly to the seller at a time when most streaming revenues are concentrated among pop’s 1 percent.
As such, underground music heads have grown rather protective of the platform, and Shelley admits he had reservations about moving Sonic Youth’s proverbial lemonade stand over there. “Some people discouraged us from doing the Bandcamp thing,” he says, “because they thought that we would be interlopers, or that we shouldn’t be a part of the scene there.” Of course, whatever pushback Shelley sensed about Sonic Youth joining Bandcamp likely amounted to but a peep compared to the audible groan that emanated from the internet earlier this month, when it was revealed that the site had been acquired by videogame empire Epic Games.
But as Bandcamp’s Chief Curator, Andrew Jervis, noted in an interview conducted before the acquisition announcement, there is no such thing as a band being too big for Bandcamp. After all, everyone from Radiohead to Iggy Pop to Björk are on there, and Jervis sees Sonic Youth’s presence as nothing but a benefit for the wider DIY community.
“A third of the sales on Bandcamp come from fans turning to other fans and saying, ‘Hey, you’ll like this,’” Jervis says. “So if a big band like Sonic Youth comes to Bandcamp, obviously, they’ll make a ripple, because fans will start to follow other fans based on their purchases. Sometimes, there are large bands out there who just treat Bandcamp like a store, but when I first talked to Steve, it was clear that he wanted to engage with Bandcamp in all the right ways.” So just as Sonic Youth once served as the indie-rock fan’s gateway to avant-garde heavies like Glenn Branca, Boredoms, or Nihilist Spasm Band, their Bandcamp page can ideally serve as a portal to less prominent artists in the site’s ecosystem.
Shelley and Ranaldo share the task of seriously considering and uploading each and every MP3 to the site, ensuring the bootlegs amount to more than just a crude data dump. “We spend a lot of time with these recordings before they actually get out to make sure that it’s enjoyable,” Shelley says. “I feel like I have to enjoy it before we ask someone else to go in and enjoy it at home.” Furthermore, the releases include crucial contextual information to help fans navigate the deluge of material. Many of the concert releases are accompanied by liner-note essays from the band’s members, or the fans who bootlegged the shows, providing both vivid in-the-moment memories of the night in question, as well as insight into the show’s significance in the overall Sonic Youth narrative.
One of those tapers is Cory Rayborn, who was responsible for a particularly unique recording—a secret 2000 set captured at the Chapel Hill, North Carolina venue Cat’s Cradle that was billed under the name Perspectives Musicales. Recorded on an off-night during the band’s summer amphitheater tour with Pearl Jam, the show essentially features individual members of Sonic Youth opening for the whole group. This was also around the time Rayborn founded Three Lobed Recordings, the psych-rock and freak-folk imprint that would go on to release a number of limited-edition records by Sonic Youth-related side projects over the years. Now, Rayborn’s long-standing relationship with Sonic Youth has put Three Lobed in the advantageous position of releasing the group’s first proper album since 2009.
In/Out/In began as two pieces—Gordon’s pulsating spoken-word tone poem “In & Out” and the thrilling 12-minute rock-out “Out & In”—that initially appeared on Three Lobed’s long-out-of print 10th-anniversary box set, not the spaces you know, but between them, in 2011. “I have a turntable in my office,” says Rayborn, a lawyer by day, “and a couple of years ago I was sitting there listening to that box set for whatever reason, and I thought, Damn, it’s crazy these tracks never reemerged in any capacity.” After Rayborn asked Ranaldo if he’d like to release them as a standalone record, Ranaldo and Shelley were inspired to see what other castaway recordings they could dig up.
Now a five-track, 45-minute collection, In/Out/In feels like the proper tombstone for Sonic Youth that was never unveiled at the time of their unceremonious end. The album’s sprawling jams—ranging from the gently melodic “Basement Contender” to the noise meltdown of “Social Static”—offer warm reminders of this group’s free-form spirit, while their mostly instrumental nature amplifies the sense of absence, like a transmission from the afterlife.
For Ranaldo and Shelley, the decision to release the album through Three Lobed was a way of supporting an enterprise that continues to nurture the underground, much as Sonic Youth did throughout their career. “We could’ve put out the vinyl ourselves and kept all the money,” Ranaldo says. “But Cory’s got a cool community that he’s fostering around his label, and his aesthetic fits with our sensibility.” Rayborn certainly doesn’t take the endorsement for granted. “It’s mind-blowing,” he says. “Go back and tell high-school me that I’ll be putting out a Sonic Youth record, and it wouldn’t make any sense.’” At the time of our mid-February conversation, he’d already pre-sold his first run of 7,500 copies, and has a re-order on the way, instantly making In/Out/In the label’s most commercially successful release by far.
It’s just one of the many ways Sonic Youth continues to spread its goodwill in absentia: Last November, the band unveiled two live recordings to support the abortion-rights battle in Texas, while, in May 2020, their Sonic Nurse facemasks helped raise money for congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s NYC COVID relief fund. Of course, the pandemic was a big catalyst for much of the group’s recent activity—with each of the Bandcamp bootlegs generating several hundred purchases at roughly $10 a pop, the releases provided a welcome income stream at a time when all touring was grounded.
However, there are limits to the band’s archival impulses. In the wake of In/Out/In, Shelley notes, “There’s not a lot of studio stuff left.” Currently, they’re looking ahead to the deluxe 30th-anniversary reissue of their Lollapalooza-era opus Washing Machine in 2025, a project they’re undertaking with Universal. For now, Shelley’s next item of business is simply to give his ears a rest. “Man, if I have to listen to our stuff for an hour per day, that’s a long time,” he says. “It’s hard to listen to Sonic Youth concerts—physically and emotionally. Because I loved the band.”
