Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star by Sonic Youth

Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star, Sonic Youth's eighth album, arrived in May 1994, and after the big-riff shove of Dirty it sounds like Kim Gordon, Thurston Moore, Lee Ranaldo and Steve Shelley deliberately turning the amps down to see what was left. They went back to Sear Sound in New York City, the room where they'd cut Sister in 1987, and the record keeps glancing over its shoulder at their old SST days.

The songs are hushed, loose and a little woozy, murmuring about private matters and politics in the same breath, with the guitars scraping and chiming instead of detonating. "Bull in the Heather" was the single, its video starring Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill. Critics dug how the band still pulled melody out of the racket, though a few found its stubborn refusal to court the mainstream hard going. It still climbed to No. 34 in the US and No. 10 in the UK, their best American showing until The Eternal hit No. 18 in 2009.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.