For a band whose best moments are often bound up with atmosphere and tension, it’s a big surprise that Sonic Youth haven’t turned their hand to any soundtrack work at any point during their thirty-year career; sure, Thurston Moore had a hand in co-ordinating the music for Todd Haynes’ most musically garish movies (the flawed, glamtastic Velvet Goldmine and the flawed, Encyclopaedia Dylanica of I’m Not There), but they’ve never penned a full-scale score before. Of course, this being Sonic Youth, masters of knowing obscurity, Hollywood doesn’t get a look-in; rather, the band’s first score is for a French thriller, entitled Simon Werner a Disparu (‘Simon Werner Has Disappeared’, though its international title is actually Lights Out), directed by first-timer Fabrice Gobert. Significantly, it also sees the resurrection of the SYR label – home to Sonic Youth’s more obtuse recordings – after a three year absence, its first release since the band signed to Matador in 2008.

Simon Werner a Disparu certainly fits into the artier end of the band’s catalogue; ‘Les Anges au Piano’ (all track titles are in French, naturellement) may begin as elegantly as the band’s 2001 high-point ‘The Empty Page’, but almost as soon as the track starts, the subdued aggression gives way to a ‘Providence’-style drone-out, complete with liberal trickles of piano. Meanwhile, the potentially-gorgeous ‘La Cabane au Zodiac’ gets Pollocked over with splashes of deliberately off-key piano breaking the peace – though for one glorious John Cage flash, the track resolves into a gorgeous harmony, all-too-briefly getting celestial before rocketing back down to earth with another unwelcome (though strangely alluring) piano ping. Yet, seemingly having learned from their latest excursions in pop song structure, most tracks here are enhanced by a brevity that most SYR releases lack – only four songs clock in over five minutes, demonstrating just how little room these compositions need to breathe. Only the climactic closing track ‘Thème d’Alice’ truly stretches out, riding a Krautrockin’ beat (thanks in no small part to Jim O’Rourke’s one-time return on bass) for thirteen minutes, while messrs Ranaldo and Moore decorate the track with all manner of guitar styles – from open-tuned twelve-string folk flourishes to some nifty Rowland S. Howard tremolo twang. To be honest, Sonic Youth have never quite recorded anything like this before, but if it’s an indication of what their next record proper might sound like, expectations should be raised. Dramatically.

The truly troubling thing about its status as an SYR release is how Simon Werner a Disparu immediately sets it up to be a curiosity for fans only; it gives little away about the film – no sampled snatches of dialogue to be found, though a couple of Sofia Coppola-esque movie stills grace the sleeve – while the lack of any vocals whatsoever will likely be a turn-off for many fans of the more recent (and more accessible) Sonic Youth records. Still, over a few listens, SYR9 acquires a grace all of its own, mixing the strung-out austerity of the band’s misunderstood late-nineties work (‘Thème de Simon’, for example, is pure ‘Diamond Sea’) with noisier moments that would have sat well on a record like Confusion Is Sex. Sure, it’s hard to work out quite how the more sprawling, jam-based tracks are meant to underscore certain scenes and characters (John Williams, this ain’t), but despite its loose feel, a few overlapping motifs and shared melodies reveal themselves over time, bringing out a cohesion that simply doesn’t make itself apparent in just one listen. As such, although it’s not quite an essential Sonic Youth release, Simon Werner a Disparu works as a pretty impressive introduction to the band’s more outré moments, and is an undoubtedly worthy addition to a neverending and indestructable body of work.