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With 19 full-length CDs to its credit, and a history stretching back to 1981, Sonic Youth has easily outlasted virtually every band that helped create the original independent rock scene, which featured other charter members such as Black Flag, the Meat Puppets and the Minutemen.
The core lineup of Thurston Moore (guitar, vocals), Kim Gordon (bass, vocals), Lee Ranaldo (guitar, vocals) and Steve Shelley (drums), in fact celebrate their 20th year together this year. The "new guy" in the lineup, multi-instrumentalist-producer Jim O'Rourke, first worked with Sonic Youth on the 2000 CD, NYC Ghosts & Flowers, and has been a full-fledged member since the 2002 Murray Street.
Gordon doesn't offer any complex theories to account for their staying power, other than the democratic nature of the group's inner workings.
"I guess we never really subscribed to the rock 'n' roll cliché of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll—or at least the first two," Gordon says, before turning to more practical reasons for the band's longevity. "We do all have input in writing. It's not like we're a band that has one or two songwriters, and so everyone feels involved, and we share in the publishing equally. That probably makes some big difference."
Like Murray Street, their new disc, Sonic Nurse, again pushes pop melody to the forefront, but without losing the adventurous and more abrasive elements that have always been the band's trademark.
"Mariah Carey and the Arthur Doyle Hand Cream" is a chunky, cacophonous rocker sweetened by a potent chorus hook built around Gordon's chant of "Hey, hey baby." "Paper Cup Exit" and "Stones", are two more songs boasting especially catchy choruses, plus stirring guitar lines that offer plenty of enticing moments, too.
Other songs, such as "New Hampshire," "Unmade Bed," and "Dripping Dream," with their epic interwoven guitars, recall the angular rock of groups like Television and the Velvet Underground.
Gordon credits O'Rourke with playing a major role in bringing out the more melodic side of Sonic Youth on both Murray Street and Sonic Nurse.
"Jim has definitely made it different," she said. "He's a real, as they say in basketball, role player. And I think whatever the song needs, he'll kind of think up parts for. I think that definitely the songs have gotten more structured because of that."
That said, there's no overlooking the central role Moore has played in these two most recent CDs.
"Like Murray Street, actually on this record, Thurston really started out writing songs for a solo record," Gordon says. "That's what he was trying to do, and then he said, 'They'll be better as Sonic Youth songs because they'll really get worked over and arranged and stuff.' So that's kind of what is definitely a similarity to Murray Street, as well."
Most of the 10 songs on Sonic Nurse arrived through a similar route, she said.
The heavier emphasis on melody on both discs is a notable development for Sonic Youth. As much as the band members may have always claimed an affinity for hooky pop, they also have been canonized by many—and criticized by some—for the artier elements of their sound.
The band emerged out of the so-called no-wave scene that emerged in New York City in the late 1970s, and many of Sonic Youth's CDs owe much to the atonal ethics of that movement, coupled with a good deal of hard-core punk noise.
Even with such unconventional tendencies, Sonic Youth, signed to Geffen/DGC Records, remains one of the few veteran bands on a major label that has never enjoyed a major hit single or a platinum album.
In the increasingly corporate, profit-driven world of the major-label record industry, even Gordon sounds as if she wonders how much longer this relationship will continue.
"Well, they don't lose money on us," she notes. "We have a back catalog [that generates sales]. But whether they keep us or not, at this point, we wouldn't be surprised if they didn't and something else would happen."
But even if Sonic Youth were to be faced with moving onto another label, they would do so in a music scene that Gordon finds conducive to bands with adventurous tendencies—and one that seems to offer more opportunities to them than even when the indie music scene first took off in the mid-1980s.
"It's huge in terms of real experimental music, really underground [stuff]," she says. "I mean, the college indie scene in the mid-'80s was pretty strong. But for bands of our ilk in the early '80s, there really wasn't much. And then there was the whole hard-core thing. That was totally outside of the mainstream.
"But there are so many really cool things going on right now," Gordon says. "It's really a good time for music."