Is Sonic Youth Reuniting? A Rarities Album is Announced

This spring, sonic Youth will release the rarities compilation In/Out/In instead of reuniting. After the divorce of the band’s leading duo, bassist-vocalist Kim Gordon and guitarist-vocalist Thurston Moore, the pioneering alt-rock group disbanded in 2011.

Fans can relive Sonic Youth’s brilliance on March 11, when the five-song In/Out/In is released digitally. The album’s first single, “In & Out,” is out today. It’s an earthy, seven-minute lo-fi rumination. Physical editions of the anthology will be available as well.

Listen to “In & Out” below, and check out the album artwork and track information at the bottom of the page.

Outtakes from Sonic Youth’s final ten years, 2000–2010, are collected in In/Out/In. During that period, the band issued their final albums — NYC Ghosts & Flowers (2000), Murray Street (2002), Sonic Nurse (2004), Rather Ripped (2006), and The Eternal (2007) — which impacted everyone from Nirvana to Sigur Ros (2009).

In/Out/In’s tracks were recorded in a variety of locations throughout the early 2000s. During the sessions for The Eternal, “Basement Contender” and “Machine” were recorded in Sonic Youth’s rehearsal room in Northampton, Massachusetts; “In & Out” was recorded in Pomona, California, and Echo Canyon, New Jersey; and “Out & In” was recorded in Echo Canyon with Jim O’Rourke, who also played on “Social Static.” Last year, Carl Saff mastered In/Out/In.

The liners of In/Out/In say it all reveals their last decade to be still heavy on the roll-tape and bug-out Sonic Youth. Not all recorded in one session but rather spread out. … The sequencing here is especially well thought out.”

“Casting an audio net over the entire instrumental/outtake oeuvre of Sonic Youth’s long history isn’t something easily committed to a single release without a doubt,” they say.

Sadly, despite their best efforts, it appears unlikely that Sonic Youth will reunite. And the band has already hinted at this. Therefore, any aspirations for a reunion would rely on Gordon and Moore’s professional reconciliation.

“We’re all living and breathing, so you never know what the future will bring,” Sonic Youth guitarist Lee Ranaldo tells Rolling Stone. “But we have not entertained [a reunion] at this point.”

It’s exciting and unfortunate. To hear that they might not ever play together again, is a sort of heavy thing however, to hear their groundbreaking, nostalgic sound is short of thrilling. In their prime Sonic Youth asserted their importance in introducing a whole generation of kids to outsider music by preaching the gospel of white noise, hardcore history, and experimental music through Spin and Rolling Stone, raising the profile of everyone from folk/blues/noise-nik John Fahey to science fiction author Philip K. Dick.

Pre-order In/Out/In here

IN AND OUT TRACKLIST 

1. “Basement Contender”
2. “In & Out”
3. “Machine”
4. “Social Static”
5. “Out & In”