Sonic Youth to play The National on July 8

The connection between songwriter and song is one that regularly draws comparisons to that linking parent to child. So typically, when a songwriting band member takes his creation to his musical cohorts, he trusts that they will handle it with care.

In the case of Sonic Youth, singer-guitarist Thurston Moore trusts his band mates to disregard all that.

"I basically will always be coming up with different song ideas, and knowing that, at some point, I want to introduce them to the band," said Moore, speaking from New York City. "And I know that when I introduce them to the band, they're going to be taken and really modified and turned into a Sonic Youth composition, as opposed to something that I am dictating.

"So I can bring in a fully structured song and have an idea of what I want people to play, but they're not going to play it. I can never tell people what to play. I can suggest that we will create entirely idiosyncratic parts for a song, and the song will just sort of change radically and turn into a Sonic Youth song. I love seeing that transformation."

From its earliest rumblings in the late'70s until now, Sonic Youth has embodied rock'n'roll experimentation. While the guitars of Moore and Lee Ranaldo can tear madly through songs, alternately embracing and rejecting melody as they go, the band generally wreaks its havoc within conventional song structures, though a little deconstruction or improvisation is never out of the question.

For Moore, there are rewards to be found in the standard and the extreme. "Oh, it's complete equal value for me," said the guitarist. "I love going out and playing improvised music. I've been employing that in Sonic Youth, especially in a live context, for better or worse, for the audience.

"But I am totally in love with the art of the song. I think the band is more about trying to create a real bridge between those two ideas: free playing and then sort of very artful composition."

Though the band's latest album, "The Eternal," features plenty of vital atonal guitar strafing, it's also one of Sonic Youth's most straight-ahead rock records. Recorded under a tight schedule, the songs benefit from the air of imposed immediacy. For Moore, he likened the experience to the write-it-today, play-it-tonight aesthetic of their earlier days.

"People really respond to traditional blues and rock. Sonic Youth has always really been interested in playing this, in a way -- playing with them in an experimental way. But I love real, traditional, in-the-pocket rock bands.

"I always loved the idea of playing riffing, rhythm-based rock'n'roll, and I love sort of having that be at the heart of what we do: rocking out."