Daydream Nation

Daydream Nation is the fifth studio album by the American alternative rock band Sonic Youth. It was released in October 1988 by Enigma in the United States, and by Blast First in the United Kingdom. A number of publications, including Rolling Stone, Spin Magazine, and Pitchfork Media have hailed it as one of the best albums of the 1980s. As a result, it is regarded as a milestone of 1980s underground music.

Although arguably the two albums immediately before it—Evol and Sister—mark Sonic Youth’s first attempts at shifting from their roots in unsettling noise-rock to a somewhat more accessible combination of avant guitar experimentation and traditional rock, for many listeners, Daydream Nation is the apex where this change fully took hold. The album cover itself invokes this transition, with the 1983 Gerhard Richter photorealist painting Kerze (“Candle”). The back cover art is a similar Richter painting from 1982.

Nevertheless, initial sales were poor, partly because Enigma Records, Sonic Youth’s American record label, went out of business not long after the record’s release. After a period of being out of print, Daydream Nation was reissued by DGC in 1993, which had signed the band largely on the strength of the crossover critical acclaim reaped by the album. In 1988, the single “Teen Age Riot”, charted on Billboard Magazine’s newly created Modern Rock Tracks chart at #20.

In 2007, Sonic Youth undertook a series of performances of the album in its entirety.