Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo

Broken Record with Rick Rubin, Malcolm Gladwell, Bruce Headlam and Justin Richmond · Sep 22, 2026 · 52m · transcript

Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo helped transform the possibilities of the electric guitar at a time when its role in rock music could seem well established. He came of age in New York City’s downtown No Wave art scene in the late 1970s before co-founding Sonic Youth with Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon in 1981. Over the next three decades, the band became an artistically and critically important act in American rock, serving as a conduit between the underground and the mainstream.

Since Sonic Youth’s dissolution in 2011, Ranaldo has continued to work prolifically as a solo artist…