Professional ratings
Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic
Blender
Chicago Tribune
Encyclopedia of Popular Music
The Guardian
NME	10/10
Rolling Stone
The Rolling Stone Album Guide
Spin Alternative Record Guide	10/10
The Village Voice	A

Daydream Nation is the fifth studio album by American alternative rock band Sonic Youth. The band recorded the album between July and August 1988 at Greene St. Recording in New York City, and it was released in October by Enigma Records as a double album. Daydream Nation was the group's last record before signing to a major label.

After Daydream Nation was released in October 1988, 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. Daydream Nation has since been widely considered to be Sonic Youth's greatest work, and an influence on the alternative and indie rock genres. It was chosen by the Library of Congress to be preserved in the National Recording Registry in 2005.

Sonic Youth's standard songwriting method involved Moore bringing in melody ideas and chord changes, which the band would spend several months fashioning into full-length songs. Instead of paring the songs down as the group usually did, the months-long writing process for Daydream Nation resulted in long jams, some of them lasting well over a half an hour. Several friends of the band, including Henry Rollins, had long praised the band's long live improvisations and told the group that its records never captured them. With Moore on a writing spree, the album ultimately had to be expanded to a double album.

Sonic Youth recorded Daydream Nation at New York's Greene Street basement studio. The studio's engineer, Nick Sansano, was accustomed to working with hip hop artists. Sansano did not know much about Sonic Youth, but he was aware the band had an aggressive sound, so he showed the band members his work on Public Enemy's "Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos" and Rob Base and DJ E-Z Rock's "It Takes Two". The group embraced the sound of the records. Sonic Youth booked three weeks of recording time at Greene Street's Studio A, starting in mid-July 1988. At $1,000 a day, it was the most the band had paid to record an album up to that point, but it was close to where members Thurston Moore, Kim Gordon and Lee Ranaldo lived.

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