Each Tuesday, FADER editor Matthew Schnipper highlights an underappreciated recent release he thinks we need to know about. This week it’s Sonic Youth’s album Washing Machine which you can purchase here. Listen to “Unwind” from the record below and read about it after the jump.

Before Washing Machine was released MTV News showed the photo of the kids with the T-shirts and showed their faces. Kurt Loder or somebody asked if anyone knew the kids in the photo because someone had found the photo on the ground at one of the Lollapaloozas and Sonic Youth wanted to use it for the cover of their album. No one ever found them so they just cut their faces off and used the photo anyway. I bought the album on cassette when it came out in October of 1995, a month after my Bar Mitzvah, used a gift certificate to HMV which had inexplicably opened in Simsbury, Connecticut. I tried to make my first AOL screen name Sonicyouth and when that was taken Sonikyouth and then Sonictooth and Soniktooth and every variation of everything on every little bit of the (Mike Mills designed) liner notes (including riffs on Zomba, which I just thought was something else weird and Sonic Youth-y. Unlucky, eventually I just went with a Beck lyric). I was home sick from school much of that seventh grade year and I listened to a lot of Sonic Youth, bought the unauthorized biography and bought whatever I could find on tape in suburban Connecticut from the massive discography (didn’t find the Coachmen, did find Ciccone Youth, which I was wholly unprepared for). I cross-referenced Lydia Lunch, bought the Dinosaur cassette, which I hated, then bought a Sebadoh tape which I liked a little better. I looked for the references in Lee Ranaldo’s lyrics (“let the city rise up to fill the screen/ clothes flung out of closets/ doorknobs falling off.” “Twister/ Dustbuster/ Hospital bed/ I’ll see you see you see you on the highway.” Twin Peaks?) The Pixies were never anyone other than the band of the backup singer from “Little Trouble Girl.” I got so, so mad every time 104.1 would play the edited version of “Diamond Sea,” would do my homework to the 19 minute version and would proud that I would make it all the way through because it’s hard to have patience as an early teen. And this summer when I stood on a slim fence and held on to a pine tree for balance so I could see Sonic Youth play Daydream Nation from start to finish without having to pay a million dollars I really just wished the encore would be Unwind but it wasn’t and it never will be again. Maybe there’s nothing classic about the record, maybe it just struck me at the same time I realized a lot of major shit in life, but two and a half minutes into “Unwind” when the time switches and the guitar is plink and the maracas come in I swear Sonic Youth has never been so delicate and never so perfect and you start to wonder if maybe that was a mistake.