Sonic Youth

Spanning the band's mid-'90s-to-present day material, The Destroyed Room collects together B-sides, studio outtakes and previously unreleased tracks, making for a compilation that remains cohesive enough to serve as an actual new release from the old farts. On "Queen Anne Chair" (which is like a mellowed out "Pacific Coast Highway") and the early-days-ish "Fire Engine Dream," they prove that although their sound changed over the years, their approach didn't. Long time Sonic Youth fans who may have felt somewhat disenfranchised with their later albums will find much to enjoy here.

New York art-punk heroes S onic Youth have long cultivated a dense, dirty guitar sound
you can completely get lost in. This band-curated, mostly vocal-free collection of outtakes
and B sides draws largely from the twenty-first century, when that sound was more
ruminative than raw. Unsurprisingly, it's a mixed bag: The lengthy jams that bookend the
disc have their moments - weird scales, tension-and-release, riffs you remember... More >