It took nearly a decade for Yo La Tengo to really become Yo La Tengo. But once they did, it also became clear that they could take the basis of whatever that meant, keep on expanding it for the rest of the band’s lifespan, and trust the people who joined their audience to stick with them because the adventure was part of the appeal. And so a group thriving on working out the contradictions — a band that could not just find all the nuances between the poles of calm and noise but make them work in inseparable tandem — came into their own with Painful because it stopped treating them like contradictions at all. As their first full-length for Matador, Painful holds a special place in the indie rock canon, but it’s more than just the album that gave them a home for thirty years and counting. It’s the one that made their noisy experimentation feel more immersive than intimidating, finding the grace in squealing, abrasive distortion and the forcefulness in negative-space gentleness. You could slot this and much of their ensuing music into an overlapping space between shoegaze and slowcore, one that reconciles two different takes on the meditative, ruminative qualities of rock. What this gave us were some of the group’s most memorable takes on their recurring themes of feeling intense emotional confusion and trying to figure out why — songs that still feel absolutely central to their whole identity. There’s a stunning beauty in the sleepwalk of “Nowhere Near,” swaying over a soon-to-be-trademark Ace Tone organ whir that a distant-sounding Georgia Hubley uses to make her feelings of love sound like remnants of a half-remembered dream. The raw-nerved yet overfamiliar exhaustion of the spat in “From a Motel 6” (“Oh well, your heart is broken/You can have what’s left of mine”) is brought into focus by the way Ira Kaplan’s Doppler-effect guitar makes it sound like the bottom dropping out of a fractured relationship over and over again. And the diptych of “Big Day Coming” — the first appearance as the billowing, drumless slow-crest leadoff track, the second as a penultimate, revved-up reprise leading into the all-encompassing sprawl of instrumental drone-jam closer “I Heard You Looking” — would be one of the most powerful pieces of evidence yet that they refused to see just one definitive angle of the world, even when it came to an individual song: Let’s be undecided/Let’s take our time/Sooner or later/We’ll know our mind.

– Nate Patrin