Daydream Nation by Sonic Youth (1988), № 81 in The Lead-In’s 100 greatest albums. Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo retune every guitar in their van and play a double album about being thirty in New York. Indie rock at full mast.
Twelve tracks in seventy minutes. Recorded across approximately three months at Greene Street Studios in NYC in summer 1988 with Nick Sansano engineering. Sonic Youth's fifth LP, the band's commercial breakthrough.
Twelve tracks in seventy minutes. Recorded across approximately three months at Greene Street Studios in NYC in summer 1988 with Nick Sansano engineering. Sonic Youth's fifth LP, the band's commercial breakthrough.
Sonic Youth in spring 1988 was Thurston Moore, Kim Gordon, Lee Ranaldo, and Steve Shelley. Four LPs into their career, they had built a substantial underground following.
Recording extended at Greene Street Studios in NYC summer 1988.
Daydream Nation consolidated Sonic Youth's deliberately-architectural guitar approach as a commercial-pop register. The deliberately-extended compositions, the deliberately-multi-vocalist approach, the deliberately-noise-rock integration established the founding template for late-1980s and early-1990s American indie rock.
Blast First released October 18, 1988. The album did not chart in the US but reached UK #99. RIAA Gold by 1992.
Daydream Nation belongs at number eighty because it consolidated Sonic Youth as a commercial-pop force.
There is no single "US/UK" original; Sonic Youth's double LP appeared as two distinct October 1988 first pressings. The UK Blast First issue (catalog BFFP 34, in association with Mute) came a day earlier; the US issue was Enigma in association with Blast First, catalog 7 75403-1, pressed by Allied. Both are 2xLP gatefolds, mastered at Masterdisk via Direct Metal Mastering (the runouts are etched with "MASTERDISK DMM" and Thurston Moore's joke side-titles), and shipped with a folded Michael Lavine band poster. The front cover reproduces Gerhard Richter's 1983 candle painting "Kerze." Clean originals with the poster intact typically trade in the low hundreds.
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