Thurston Moore On Making The 'Elixir' To America's Current Political Climate

Since his uber-influential art-rock outfit Sonic Youth pulled up stumps in 2011, legendary guitarist and songwriter Thurston Moore has had no problem keeping busy. Moving primarily in underground noise rock and improvisational circles, in the intervening years he's worked on numerous projects and collaborated with countless musicians, but it's only now that he's revisiting more commercial realms with his new solo album Rock N Roll Consciousness.

"We recorded it I guess in late 2015, I did the mixing in early 2016 and then all last year I worked on how I wanted to present it, with the artwork and how the sequence was going to flow. I sort of didn't want the record to come out in a year of political campaigning in the USA, because it was so contentious. It was so heinous that I was like, 'I don't even want to be active in a culture that's just overwhelmed by this inanity.' As it is I feel really happy that it's coming out in the springtime of 2017, in a way it works because the songs are very beatific and it works as like an elixir to the reality of what has happened with the USA being so poisoned.

"It works as like an elixir to the reality of what has happened with the USA being so poisoned."

"To me, it's a token of promise and springtime and awakening and new energy, like, 'Let's get up there and gather our amplifiers and surround Trump Tower and blast them as loud as we can with noise and stuff until it crumbles into the fake gold dust that it is.' That's kind of the idea," Moore deadpans before dissolving into peals of laughter. "That's what I tell people: 'Take this record, put it on your boombox and just blast it at the Trump Tower.'"

For his fifth proper solo album, Moore regathered The Thurston Moore Band who worked on his previous solo album The Best Day (2014) - Sonic Youth drummer Steve Shelley, My Bloody Valentine bassist Debbie Googe and guitarist James Sedwards - and recorded it at The Church in London (where Moore now lives). At the helm was pop producer Paul Epworth (Adele, Florence & The Machine), but for that experimental edge the album was mixed in Seattle with Randall Dunn (Boris, Sunn O))), Earth) resulting in a nice balance of the accessible and avant-garde.

"[The Best Day] was made just finding out what people sounded like, and there were some songs on the record that were just me playing acoustic guitars and everything on the track, so it's a bit of a pastiche that record," Moore reflects. "Then we released it on Matador and ended up doing shows without announcing who we were, so people would end up coming to see the shows to some degree thinking, 'It's Thurston, so he's either going to play some noise guitar or some acoustic guitar, or he's going to be juggling chainsaws' - they didn't know what I was going to do then. Then they would look at the band come out and go, 'Oh it's Steve Shelly! Wow, it's Deb Googe!' I still think people thought that maybe it would be some transitional thing, but we realised as we were touring that we were really happy as a group.

"We've all for the most part been through the wars together as far as being in groups that were high profile during the late '80s and into the '90s, so we feel at this point that we kind of did that and we're not really looking to replicate that, or wave our hands in the air and try to draw attention to ourselves. We just felt like we're kind of liberated to just enjoy being creative, and people kind of know who we are. For this record I wanted to focus on the group as I know how they can play, because I don't think that on The Best Day I was able to let them breathe so much, it was just, 'Here's the song, let's play it.'

"Now it's like I wrote these songs knowing who the musicians were, that's why the songs are so lengthy because I really wanted these players to play. I really wanted James Sedwards to just shred on guitar, so I would allow these sections on there for him to go out and do that, and also for Deb and Steve to really get their feet wet. That was kind of on my mind doing the songwriting, knowing who this group is and wanting them to sort of have their say, and it's really cool right now because we've established ourselves as a working group and it's not just some dalliance."