New York is Lou Reed's great return: after years of highs and lows and the misstep of Mistrial, the artist delivered in 1989 his most committed and coherent work since Berlin. A concept album about the city that forged him, New York is a political and social document of enormous power that portrays crack-era New York, AIDS, police violence, and political hypocrisy with a journalist's precision and a poet's fury.
Reed wrote all the songs in a three-week burst and recorded them with the same urgency, creating a raw and direct sound that dispenses with any unnecessary ornamentation. The guitar duo with Mike Rathke gives the album a rough, honest texture that perfectly complements the hardness of the lyrics. 'Dirty Blvd.', 'Halloween Parade', and 'Dime Store Mystery' are masterpieces of political rock.
New York was acclaimed as one of the best albums of 1989 and definitively revitalized Reed's career. His liner notes asked the listener to hear it like a novel or a film, from beginning to end without interruption. It is the album where Reed definitively proved that he remained one of the most important and necessary artists of his generation.