“Europe ’72 was a super influential record full of fantastic songs and amazing experimental musicianship. I always valued both of those aspects in what Sonic Youth has done through the years — being able to get very abstract and very concrete within the same song.”

– Lee Ranaldo

“The importance of the band to so many musicians and the surprising sides of their musical legacy. The obvious one we already knew about was the jam band culture in America. We were less interested in that. That’s been done, so it was not necessarily something that we were pursuing on this record. I had a hunch that if we started digging, we would find some surprising fans of the Dead, those who were specifically focusing on their songwriting and also some of the more avant-garde and compositional sides of where their influence lies.” 

– Bryce Dessner