Sister by Sonic Youth

Sister, Sonic Youth's fourth album, came out on SST on June 1, 1987, and for once the band walked in with the same lineup that made the last record: Thurston Moore, Kim Gordon, Lee Ranaldo and drummer Steve Shelley. They wrote the songs on the road, cut them early that year, and hung the whole thing loosely on the life and fiction of Philip K. Dick.

It picks up where EVOL left off, dragging the old no wave racket toward actual songs without filing down its teeth. The oddly tuned guitars still chime, grind and shriek, but "Schizophrenia" and "(I Got A) Catholic Block" have shapes you could almost hum. It didn't sell much at the time, though the critics were won over, and plenty of later lists have ranked it among the best albums of the '80s.

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