Stephen Mejias

I hope all you dudes are enjoying the same sort of sweaty sweet record-breaking weather we're experiencing here in NYC this week (until tomorrow when it gets cold again).

And I also hope you've taken advantage of Matador's Buy Early Get Now plan, and have begun your love affair with Sonic Youth's latest mind-melter, The Eternal. It's the perfect music for this summery heat.

It should be called The Fucking Eternal. I am streaming the hell out of it right now, and it's tossing my flabby body all around the suffocatingly hot office.

It's always so easy to say that this band or that band was influenced by Sonic Youth; that this band or that band sounds like Sonic Youth. Until you hear Sonic Youth. And you remember that no band sounds like Sonic Youth.

With The Eternal, it's like somebody said, "Will the real Sonic Youth please stand up?" And Sonic Youth stood way the hell up—like, 1500 feet high in the sky—and said: "Yo, what up?"