EVOL

EVOL is the third studio album by American alternative rock band Sonic Youth. It was released in May 1986, through SST Records; the band's first release on the label. The album is notable for being the first with new drummer Steve Shelley, replacing Bob Bert, and for showing signs of the band transitioning away from their no wave past and toward a greater alternative rock sensibility. Sonic Youth recorded EVOL at Before Christ with Martin Bisi in Brooklyn, New York and had Mike Watt of the Minutemen play bass on "In the Kingdom #19" and "Bubblegum". The album was later re-issued on 180gram pink vinyl. Despite not being successful at the time, the album was very well praised by critics later on with Pitchfork saying that EVOL "[was] where the seeds of greatness were sown", " and they placed EVOL thirty-first on their list of the one hundred best albums of the 1980s. and Allmusic said that EVOL is "a stunningly fluent mixture of avant-garde instrumentation and subversions of rock & roll." giving it a score of four and a half. Even Robert Christgau, with whom the band had sparred, gave it a B+.