Sonic Youth: Celebrating 30 years of their sixth album ‘Goo'

Can you believe it’s already been three decades since Sonic Youth released their absolutely unforgettable sixth studio album Goo way back in 1990?

Peaking at number 96 on the US Billboard 200, their highest chart position to date, Sonic Youth’s sixth album Goo marked the band’s first major-label album debut with Geffen Records.

The album included the hit single ‘Kool Thing’, which featured Public Enemy’s Chuck D and solidified the group’s stance as a force to be reckoned with in the alt music scene of the ’90s, with the track appearing in the Hal Hartley film Simple Men and the video game Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock.

The milestone comes nearly nine years after Kim Gordon, former bassist and frontwoman of Sonic Youth, discussed the breakdown of her 29-year marriage to husband and bandmate Thurston Moore following a 2013 affair which lead to the dissolution of their marriage and the end of Sonic Youth.

In her 2015 memoir Girl In A Band, Gordon claimed that the pair’s breakdown occurred “in slow motion, a pattern of lies, ultimatums, and phoney promises, followed by emails and texts that almost felt designed to be stumbled on, so as to force me to make a decision that he was too much of a coward to face. I was furious. It wasn’t just the responsibility he was refusing to take; it was the person he had turned me into: his mother.”

She continued: “I mean, if you loved someone, you can try to understand them,” the 66-year-old said of Moore’s infidelity with a younger woman.

“You know, I empathise, but at the same time, you have to protect yourself from trauma and getting hurt again,” she said, adding, “Well, you can’t really forgive someone if they don’t say they’re sorry.”