Sonic Youth are to release their final US show as a new live album.

The band are maintaining a healthy archive project, bringing to light some special performances and rare material. Having decided to call it quits in 2011, Sonic Youth embarked on a final tour, resulting in some emotional performances.

Much of the circumstances are recounted in Kim Gordon’s excellent memoir, while the music is now beginning to surface officially.

New live album ‘Live In Brooklyn 2011’ documents the band’s final show in the United States, and appropriately it took place in New York. Guitarist Lee Ranaldo recalls…

“The stage was facing the East River from the Williamsburg, Brooklyn waterfront, and I recall the sun going down in the west during our set. It was a pretty magical, if kinda weird day. Fitting, somehow, that our ‘last show’ should be in New York City, our home and where it all began…”

Looking back, drummer Steve Shelley says:

This show was a culmination of a run of really special outdoor summertime shows in New York City for us, starting in ’92 with Summerstage in Central Park when we played with Sun Ra. For the Williamsburg Waterfront show I wrote out the set list to present to the band and it was a lot of material we hadn’t played in a while, a lot of deep cuts, so I wasn’t sure if everybody would feel like doing it. After worrying about which songs the band might say yes or no to, I threw those concerns out the window and I just made a list of songs that I thought would be a great set.

We practiced the week of the show at our space in Hoboken and put the set together. First we’d try and make sure we had a guitar in the song’s tuning, then we’d try to remember the arrangement and try and put it together, sometimes re-learning bar by bar. In the end I think the whole song list made it through. Even as early as ’86 and ’87 we stopped playing ‘Death Valley 69’ and ‘Brave Men Run’ with any regularity. We’d just get excited about new material coming into the set and songs would get ‘retired’ and wouldn’t get played again for years. So on this particular night in Brooklyn a lot of those retired songs and deep cuts got dusted off and played for this show. It turned out to be a pretty special event with a really special song list.

‘Live In Brooklyn 2011’ will be released on August 18th through Silver Current Records – check out ‘Intro>Brave Men Run (In My Family)>Death Valley ’69’ below, and pre-order the album online.

Photo Credit: Eric Baecht