The cover of Sonic Youth’s 1985 album Bad Moon Rising is one of indie rock’s most striking pieces of iconography, with its silhouette of a scarecrow in a crucifixion pose, topped with an evil-grinning Jack o’Lantern set ablaze against the backdrop of the New York City skyline at dusk. It’s a picture that both vividly reflects the album’s thematic autopsy of the dark heart burning inside the American dream, and the ’80s NYC underground itself, a visualization of the feral noise erupting at night in the shadow of the skyscrapers. And coming from a band that’s hardly lacking for T-shirt-worthy album covers, Bad Moon Rising has remained the perfect avatar for Sonic Youth’s violent collision of primitivism and futurism, and their tendency to invest live performance with all the horror and transcendence of a ritual sacrifice.
A quarter century later, Sonic Youth would recreate that incendiary scene on the shores of the East River—though instead of lighting up a wicker man, they offered up themselves. The band’s August 2011 appearance at the Williamsburg waterfront wasn’t technically their last concert, but it was the final appearance of the Sonic Youth that we had come to know and love: the familial, telepathic, eternally spry entity who could translate avant-garde guitarchitecture into punk-rock abandon and vice versa, led by the world’s coolest mom and dad. Behind the scenes, however, Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon were on the verge of ending their 27-year marriage, and once the breakup was made public two months later, Sonic Youth’s seemingly eternal flame was suddenly extinguished with a bucket of cold water. The band would fulfill a handful of South American dates already on the books for that November, a lame-duck campaign Gordon would later describe in her memoir as a “raw, weird pornography of strain and distance.” But if someone were to make a factually sloppy Bohemian Rhapsody-style biopic about Sonic Youth, then the Williamsburg show would be its glorious Live Aid-sized climax—the revisionist Hollywood ending for a doomed New York institution.
Live in Brooklyn 2011 was originally made available in 2020 as part of the deluge of official bootlegs that’s flooded Sonic Youth’s Bandcamp page, but it’s the first live recording from that batch to be mixed, mastered, and packaged for physical release (via Silver Current, the boutique outsider-psych label run by Comets on Fire/Howlin’ Rain honcho Ethan Miller). The special treatment is a testament to the show’s significance in Sonic Youth lore and to the peerless performance captured on the recording. Those who experienced this show first-hand, blissfully unaware of the drama stewing offstage, were treated to the rare spectacle of a band hitting explosive new peaks as a live act some 30 years into the game. But with the benefit of hindsight, Live in Brooklyn 2011 sounds more like the adrenalized fight-or-flight response from a band that knew its days were numbered. As Gordon would later write of the band’s final shows: “What got me through was being onstage, the visceral thrill of performing. Extreme noise and dissonance can be an incredibly cleansing thing.”