100 Best Albums Of All Time

01 Teen Age Riot

02 Silver Rocket

03 The Sprawl

04 ’Cross the Breeze

05 Eric’s Trip

06 Total Trash

07 Hey Joni

08 Providence

09 Candle

10 Rain King

11 Kissability

12 Trilogy:

a) The Wonder

b) Hyperstation

c) Eliminator Jr.

As a vision of the future, Sonic Youth’s magnum opus – on release a double record of just 12 extended tracks – sounds more relevant with every year that passes. The 21st century begins on this album. It took every improbable element of the downtown Manhattan four-piece, from their hardcore zealousness and pop sensibility to their art brat humour and cyberpunk worldview, and consolidated it into this album where the sheer fury obtains a graceful uplift. Daydream Nation sounds like an antidote to a digital age that hasn’t yet come to pass.

‘Close your eyes and make believe, you can do whatever you please,’ sings bassist Kim Gordon on the taut ‘’Cross the Breeze’, and throughout the album fantasy is often where a new reality begins. The barrelling, electric riff of opener ‘Teen Age Riot’, which sounds like it’s spurring drummer Steve Shelley on to new heights by the tune’s close, was originally titled ‘J Mascis for President’ – a fantasy of guitarist Thurston Moore, where Mascis, the then underground frontman of Dinosaur Jr, proves to be the ultimate third party candidate. In the song, Moore’s protagonist is steadfastly bed-bound, but the arrangement levitates as the bass moans in oceanic appreciation of what is unfolding.

The dreams of guitarist Lee Ranaldo on selections such as ‘Eric’s Trip’ are rich and explicit, as if screwdrivers on guitar strings had replaced LSD as a way of rewriting your synapses. ‘I’m over the city, fucking the future,’ he declares, and the song is a series of cataclysms that refuse to slow down as Ranaldo and Moore offer up counter-melodies that take in psychedelic flecks and razorish runs. Another Ranaldo song, ‘Hey Joni’, achieves take-off velocity within seconds and then eases down into impressionistic verses before it revs up again – ‘Kick it’ demands Ranaldo, and the song somehow does just that with joyous abandon. It was the absence of Ranaldo as a songwriter that would weaken Sonic Youth in the 1990s, but here his contributions are vital.

It’s the different authorial voices that help make Daydream Nation so invigorating and, alongside Moore’s imaginary beat-era argot and Ranaldo’s vivid flashcards, there’s the cool, evaluative prose of Kim Gordon. On ‘The Sprawl’ she imagines herself as a veteran of the grimy sci-fi vision of novelist William Gibson (his paperback Sprawl was the decaying BAMA, the singular Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis), who remembers where she fought with ‘the big machines’. In ‘Kissability’ the power structure being challenged is the patriarchal, acquisitive record business – ‘You could be a star,’ a leering suit tells Gordon; ‘you could go far’.

Sonic Youth actually would sign to a major label for 1990’s Goo – an outcome inspired in part by difficulties with the independent American distributor of Daydream Nation – but in 1988 they sounded like their fellow ’80s inspirations for ’90s alternative rock, the Pixies; a correct answer to a question that hadn’t quite been framed. For all the momentum – aural and psychic – the quartet never sounds remotely like they’re exerting themselves. The sense of effortlessness only adds to the enjoyment.

The majority of these songs – except ‘Providence’, an atmospheric collage that serves as a mid-album exhalation (of pot) – played equally well in the moshpit and on headphones. That duality culminated in the three-part finale, ‘Trilogy’, where Moore’s nighttime odyssey through New York goes through ecstatic release and slow-motion violence (he gets mugged at 3am) before Gordon turns the sexual fervour at the beginning of ‘Eliminator Jr.’ into a criminal prosecution. On Daydream Nation the only given is that the songs don’t just end in unexpected places, they begin in them as well.