There's an old punk maxim that you should never trust anyone over 30. And yet as Sonic Youth rapidly approach the big three-oh, their music is on an upward curve.
It's ludicrous to think that a 29-year-old band can still be making vibrant, spirited, aggressive, exciting, experimental music — especially when all of the members are in their 40s and 50s. In those three decades, the band — initially founded as The Arcadians in 1980 by New York art-scenesters Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon, who married in 1984 — have turned out 16 albums plus innumerable releases with side projects. And yet new album "The Eternal" is right up there with their very best.
"Right now we just seem to be in a certain place," says the band's drummer Steve Shelley on the band's recent run of critically lauded albums, which since 2004 have been setting the band straight after a self-indulgent late-teen period.