How SY does it

Music first, then vocals. (New Yorker)

Gordon does the screaming on “The Eternal” while the boys do the nice singing. Several songs feature one or more of them singing in unison, an arrangement trick that Sonic Youth has so far largely avoided. Moore told me that the band was purposefully exploring more conventional vocal techniques, such as “getting Lee to harmonize with my non-singing.” Nonetheless, as has always been the group’s way, the vocals come only after the music for each piece is recorded. At that point, Moore, Gordon, and Ranaldo divvy up the songs, and each tries singing on a different one, sometimes trading after a week or so if someone is stuck, sometimes adding a track on top of someone else’s. The fact that the music is finished first is a point of pride, and is perhaps the best testament to the band’s career-long loyalty to the possibilities of sound. “For us, songs get born out of a guitar’s tonality as much as they get born out of chords and structures,” Ranaldo says. “We’re creating pieces of music as pieces of music. That’s all we’re thinking about. ‘Does this piece of music sound good?’ ”