Stephen Mejias

New York City's Matador Records rewards hardcore music lovers and promotes the growth of the music industry with their intelligent "Buy Early Get Now" plan. With BEGN, fans can pre-order upcoming albums through participating trustworthy retailers across the nation. In addition to the actual album, BEGN packages include exclusive bonuses such as MP3s, posters, band merchandise, and, a free, legal stream of the entire album weeks before the official release date. I like it.

I complain all the time about my pre-orders never arriving. Matador's plan helps to erase the anxiety by promising immediate and convenient incentives&#151a smart move in a world where immediacy and convenience are increasingly expected in the face of diminishing regard to quality. The idea here, however, is not to replace quality, but to supplement it. I only wish that low-quality MP3s would be forever killed in favor of hi-rez files. But wait: Matador offers downloads in two formats: 320kbps MP3s and lossless FLAC. No DRM. Well, alright! (Album streams are provided at 128kbps and, pleasantly, are not watered-down with heartbreaking clips or infuriating buzzes or jolting electric shocks.)

The latest Matador release to be given the BEGN treatment is Sonic Youth's The Eternal (release date: June 9). Yeah.

Along with your pre-order of The Eternal on LP or CD, you’ll get:
&#151pre-release stream of album on April 28
&#151bonus limited exclusive vinyl live LP on street date, either in your mailbox or your favorite record store (While supplies last)
&#151bonus limited-edition poster on street date
&#151bonus exclusive MP3 outtakes and live tracks
&#151early access to tour presale ticket offer

Alright, so, my order is in. Fifty bucks. I know, I know. But I'm a fan and I want. A few weeks back, Matador's publicity director, Nils Bernstein, stopped by the office to discuss the new album. The signing of Sonic Youth to Matador makes such beautiful sense: One of the world's most influential rock bands leaves Geffen to join hands with one of the world's most influential independent rock labels. And so I was half-expecting (and altogether hoping) to hear some sort of psychedelic blissed-out freak-fest. But The Eternal isn't really that. Instead, it depicts a vibrant, pulsing, energetic Sonic Youth, a band that sounds confident and true to itself, but revitalized, and with the addition of Pavement's Mark Ibold on bass, is tighter and more powerful than ever. It is a collection of songs that seems to recall the finer movements of the band's long and varied career, from the hot and heavy no-wave noise of 1983's Confusion is Sex to the explosion-pop of 1990's Goo to the sun-drenched rock riffage of 2006's Rather Ripped.

Robert Baird met with Sonic Youth's Lee Ranaldo and Steve Shelley on Monday afternoon at the band's Hoboken studio to discuss the new album. The interview will appear in an upcoming issue of Stereophile.