Sonic Youth to Officially Release Long-Bootlegged 1985 Live Performances

As there is zero chance that they are going to ever get back together, the members of Sonic Youth have spent the last five years generously digging into their voluminous archives and sharing some fantastic live recordings of the band from throughout their long history. Most have been released only in digital form via the group’s Bandcamp page. But earlier this year, a physical artifact in the form of a CD / vinyl arrived, capturing the group’s 2011 gig in Brooklyn — their last performance on American soil before breaking up.

The band’s largesse continues on February 2nd, 2024 with the official release of Walls Have Ears, an infamous bootleg featuring recordings captured during Sonic Youth’s trips to the U.K. in 1985. The double LP and CD release will be issued via drummer Steve Shelley’s label Smells Like Records.

As the story goes, the then-quartet had a serious fan in Paul Smith, a promoter who had worked for various labels in England. He was so enamored of the band that he founded his own imprint, Blast First Records, to release their 1985 album Bad Moon Rising. And when Sonic Youth would make the jump across the pond to play some shows, Smith served as liaison and tour manager. He also took upon himself to get recordings of these gigs and, unbeknownst to the band, decided to compile the best of these onto a vinyl set. Once word got back to Sonic Youth however, they forced him to pull the LPs from shops and it quickly became a coveted collector’s item for fans and has been bootlegged unofficially many times over since.

Walls Have Ears serves as a document of the band in transition, both away from the more free form experimentation that marked their earlier work into more structured songcraft and from one drummer to the next. The first disc of the vinyl version features Shelley on his first U.K. tour with Sonic Youth, playing at the University of London Union in October of 1985. On the second, recorded six months earlier at a gig supporting Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Bob Bert was still manning the drum throne.

This new release from Sonic Youth comes on the heels of another unsurprisingly busy time from its former members. This past October, singer / guitarist Thurston Moore published his memoir Sonic Life, while Shelley both produced and played drums on They Live in My Head, the first album in 11 years from iconic No Wave band Bush Tetras.

Listen to “Expressway To Yr. Skull (Radio Edit)” below.