There’s something about a modern bootleg that doesn’t feel quite like stealing. That fabled ‘unreleased track’ is usually just one Soundcloud search away. That crazy live version? It will probably be back up on YouTube as fast as it was taken down. We live, for the most part, in an age of instant musical gratification – and while I for one am very grateful that I can listen to the ‘Diet Mountain Dew’ demo from the comfort of my own Spotify podcast tab, there is something forlorn about the death of the true bootleg.

Can you imagine it? The thrill of chasing down a record you know you aren’t supposed to have. Feeling like a voyeur, a klepto, Nancy Drew and Howard Carter all at once. Feeling that you are on the path to uncovering treasure; something intimate, uncut, raw and real – tirelessly configuring scraps of an artist you thought you knew into an expanded mould of an embodied whole. Hearing something that grants you membership to the secret club of those who know.

For Sonic Youth fans, there is one such illicit album in particular that has transcended mythic status in the band's lore. Sonic Youth hated it, but luckily for us the weight of its infamy has finally worn down the now-disbanded act – and for the first time in almost 40 years we are granted official passage to see what all the fuss is about.

“Shut your fucking face. I want just 2 minutes of your attention, I have a very interesting story to tell you…” Welcome to Walls Have Ears.

Built from unauthorised recordings of the UK tour for their first 3 albums, Walls Have Ears paints a kaleidoscopic portrait of Sonic Youth before ‘Daydream Nation’ shot them to fame. The record well and truly lives up to its legendary status but heed my warning, it is far from a victory lap of B-sides and rarities… Expect wobbly scaffolds of noise collapsing in on themselves into unintelligible mush. Expect no production whatsoever. Expect tinnitus. All of the off-key vocals, sludgy discordances, and tinny hiccups might even make you feel like you’re experiencing a parasocial ego death. Not to mention the ominous melodic drones that make you feel like an evil hypnotic chant is taking the ‘Expressway to Yr. Skull’. If you’re reading any of this as criticism you are sorely mistaken. Walls Have Ears is a time machine to the primordial sludge of ‘cool’ as we know it – and 38 years on it’s just as innovative as when it debuted. You’ll have to hear for yourself.

While the official release of Walls Have Ears has made the record a canon chapter in the rise and fall of the Sonic Youth empire, there’s something about it that feels out of place. This is of course because, if not for the humble bootlegger, we were never meant to hear it – in fact Lee Ranaldo and Kim Gordon have bitterly expressed their revile for it on multiple occasions. Among a sea of clashy, clunky, crusty live albums, this is the real and only Sonic Youth uncut. Seen here beyond the scope of their own imagination they are a deer in the headlights of their stardom to come – bashing through band-ly adolescence with the white hot fervour that would seed their ever influential success. At the time of ‘Walls Have Ears’ Sonic Youth were already too big to fail. More than a decade after their disbandment this official release is a joyful rumination on this fact.

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Lara Young

8 August 2024