After Daydream Nation was released, it received widespread acclaim from critics and earned Sonic Youth a major label deal.
The album was ranked high in critics' year-end lists of 1988's best records, being voted second in The Village Voice's annual Pazz & Jop poll.
[3] Sonic Youth's standard songwriting method involved Thurston Moore bringing in melody ideas and chord changes that the band would spend several months fashioning into full-length songs.
Instead of paring the songs down as the group did with previous records, the months-long writing process for Daydream Nation resulted in long jams, some lasting over half an hour.
[7] The session became rushed near the end, when Paul Smith, the head of the band's British label Blast First, had set a mastering date of August 18.
The album is especially notable for being a significant influence for later alternative and indie rock efforts and genres, including well-known grunge band Nirvana.
[9] "'Cross the Breeze" features some of Gordon's most intense singing, with such lyrics as "Let's go walking on the water/Now you think I'm Satan's daughter/I wanna know, should I stay or go?/I took a look into your hate/It made me feel very up to date".
[11] It is sung by Ranaldo, and has surrealist lyrics such as "Shots ring out from the center of an empty field/Joni's in the tall grass/She's a beautiful mental jukebox, a sailboat explosion/A snap of electric whipcrack".
In 1989, they took the tour to New Zealand, Australia, Japan, the USSR and Europe, finishing the year with their first network television appearance—on the syndicated Night Music—playing "Silver Rocket".
[39] Giving the album an "A" grade in The Village Voice, Robert Christgau believed that while the band were embracing a "happy-go-lucky careerism and four-on-the-floor maturity", their relentlessly discordant music was "a philosophical triumph".
[40] Rolling Stone's Robert Palmer rated it three-and-a-half stars out of five and said it demonstrated "the broad harmonic palette, sharply honed songwriting skills and sheer exhilarating drive" of the "influential quartet", while presenting "the definitive American guitar band of the Eighties at the height of its powers and prescience".
[41] The British music press also embraced Daydream Nation: Q magazine said the record made an "enthralling noise";[39] the NME called it the "most radical and political album of the year" and awarded it a maximum score of ten;[42] and Record Mirror gave it a five-out-of-five rating, enthusing that Sonic Youth were "the best band in the universe".
According to Matthew Stearns, writer of the 33⅓ book dedicated to the album, it has been "resoundingly canonized as a breakthrough landmark in the chronicles of avant-rock expression".
[44] Stearns wrote that Daydream Nation comprised the "Holy Trinity" of early indie rock double albums with Hüsker Dü's Zen Arcade and Minutemen's Double Nickels on the Dime, judging that the three works "together mark a period of unprecedented creative expansion in terms of the possibilities of underground (or otherwise) American rock music".
[2] Jon Matsumoto of the Los Angeles Times called it the band's masterpiece and said they had developed first-rate songwriting skills to complement their penchant for dissonant instrumentation.
[49] Greg Kot, writing in the Chicago Tribune, called it one of the most recognizable albums of the 1980s with its combination of "hypnotic guitar jams and some of the band's best, straight-ahead tunes".
[30] Reviewing the 2007 deluxe edition, Christgau credited Daydream Nation for making alternative rock "a life force" and remarked that, along with the "vital" bonus disc, the album remained an honest and thrilling listen because of its musical tunings and anthemic songs about post-irony and "confusion-as-sex".
[58] Less favorably, Chuck Eddy describes Daydream Nation as "two discs of good Hawkwind, with an I Ching groove sleek enough to send your cow jumping over the moon, but most of it's watery wallpaper regardless.