In October 2018, Sonic Youth announced that they would be releasing selected performances from their live archive via streaming/download site nugs.net. The initial launch featured six gigs, as well as Lance Bangs' Daydream Nation concert film, which was also appearing in select theatres to promote the 30th anniversary of the album. Indeed, many of this first batch are quite Daydream-heavy, with two '88 gigs recorded a month apart, and a 2007 set from the "play the whole album front to back" tour (same show as Lance's film). Four of the shows are excellent soundboard recordings from the band's archives, including Murray Street and The Eternal tour sets, and the band's final North American performance in Brooklyn, arguably their most intriguing set list of the 21st century.
Two more shows were added in January 2019, including a delicious A Thousand Leaves tour gem, and the infamous 1990 Irvine gig previously partially available on the Dirty Boots EP. Aaron Mullan, the band's studio engineer and live sound expert for the 2000s, remixed the entire set with Steve Shelley while the band was working on the Goo deluxe reissue. While most of the performances in this series are largely unedited, this one was mixed with more attention given to each individual song and cleaned up slightly where necessary.
In April 2019, two more shows appeared, an audience recording from 1987 and a mind-melting sonic assault from the Nurse tour of 2004. These were followed in June by a 1993 audience tape and one of the highlights of this series, the first night of the band's 2001 Goodbye 20th Century tour, featuring performances of many SYR4 pieces and a few originals.
In December 2019, the Berlin 2009 show was finally made available via CD (an initial feature promised when the archive launched). December 2019 also saw the release of another Daydream Nation tour album, taken from previously unavailable April '89 performances in Moscow. This was initially a limited vinyl/CD release on Fee Lee Records that the band consented to, and made available physically via their store, as well as download - however, not via nugs.
As of July 2020, there has been no new content added to nugs.net, and in March the band developed a presence on bandcamp that appears to have replaced nugs. All of the shows featured on nugs are also available on bandcamp, and they have also added previous physical releases for streaming/download, including Venlo '83, Austin '86, Lisbon '93, and the previously mentioned Moscow '89. In the two months since the last update of this site, they have continued to add more previously unreleased live material as well as archival reissues like the SYR series.
The following is a list of the releases that were originally unique to streaming/download via nugs and later bandcamp. Below that is a list of the previously released official bootlegs which have been made available again, sometimes with notable improvements.
Please note that these releases are often not given cohesive names, varying depending on which site you are looking at, so I've chosen a more straightforward system to identify them.
STREAMING/DOWNLOAD EXCLUSIVES
BOOTLEG "REISSUES"
RARITIES COMPILATIONS
| RARITIES 1 |
| RARITIES 2 |
| RARITIES 3 |
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