Washing Machine reached No. 58 on the US Billboard 200 chart and No. 39 on the UK Albums Chart. The album received generally positive reviews from music critics, who praised the band for exploring new challenges as well as the guitar playing of band members Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo.
The album was the follow-up to Sonic Youth's 1994 DGC album Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star. After Experimental Jet Set, the band decided to take a hiatus from performing live and concentrated on numerous side projects. Moore and Gordon also had their first child, Coco. According to Moore, their daughter had provided a different perspective for the band: "I'm more focused and level-headed. There's a sublime awareness factor of your spiritual place in the world. I feel more at ease with myself ... Babies are little Buddhas. They're completely great".
Washing Machine was recorded at Easley Studios in Memphis, where some indie rock bands like Pavement, Guided by Voices, and Grifters had previously recorded albums. Moore remarked that the atmosphere in Memphis helped them disconnect from the people who were constantly following the band. He also felt that Washing Machine was conceived and recorded like some of the band's first albums, stating that it "hearkens back to records like Sister where we'd write a bunch of songs, go into the studio for a month, put them down, then go on the road and play them for a year. By the end of the year they'd mutate into something much more excited". Gordon credited Memphis for its relaxed atmosphere and cited the album as one of her favorites.
The song "The Diamond Sea" was notable for its 19:35 duration. Moore explained the length of some of the album's songs: "We all have different aesthetics as to how songs should work. I generally push for a lot of abandon while some people in the group are more interested in truncating things. If I was the leader as much as people say I am, every song would be 20 minutes long". The unlisted ninth track, officially called "Becuz Coda", was originally part of the song "Becuz", but the record label felt they needed to cut the seven-and-a-half-minute track to make the album's opening more accessible.
About the lyrics and unlike Experimental Jet Set, which was described as difficult and claustrophobic, Washing Machine is considerably more open-ended and contains some of the band's longest songs, except of course the final track, "The Diamond Sea", which was the lengthiest track on any Sonic Youth album. The song was edited down to 5:15 for release as a single, which included an alternate 25-minute version as an additional track. Washing Machine was the band's first album on which Gordon almost exclusively played guitar instead of bass, resulting in a three-guitar and drums lineup. Mostly of the songs were unfolded over even-tempered rhythms and guitars that linger rather than attack. A splatter of distortion may enter, but the effect is mostly languid and wonderfully hypnotic".
Although Gordon's lyrics on Experimental Jet Set addressed gender roles and stereotypes, her contributions to Washing Machine were considered more feminine and girl-oriented. Tom Moon of Rolling Stone noted: "The title track is an odd, earnest love song; "Panty Lies" was a playground taunt blown to absurd extremes; and "Little Trouble Girl", was a dramatic, earnest coming-of-age story" and features vocals by Gordon and Kim Deal (of Pixies and the Breeders) along with other musicians. Gordon felt that Deal had an ideal voice for the melodic part and explained that the song was about "wanting to be seen for who you really are, being able to express those parts of yourself that aren't 'good girl' but that are just as real and true". Lee Ranaldo contributed two songs, "Saucer-Like" and "Skip Tracer". The latter was co-written with his wife Leah Singer, inspired by a performance that the couple attended of riot grrrl duo Mecca Normal. The song also alludes to the band's special relationship with a major label.
The track "Junkie's Promise", sung by Moore, was described as a "heroin vignette", although it was originally interpreted as a tribute to Kurt Cobain of Nirvana, Moore explained that the song is only about the emotional relationship between friends, with one of them being a drug addict. According to him, "Any individual involved with drug addiction will lie to his friends for the self-serving need. It's the cruelest truth of the situation. Kurt may fit this profile and he was surely in my mind as I wrote but the song is not a specific dedication to him". The songs "Becuz" and "No Queen Blues" were built upon numb grooves with slivers of melody, power, and gorgeously crafted noise. "The Diamond Sea" was described as a "Neil Young-esque ballad billowing into an epic noise excursion". According to Pitchfork, the song was described it as the most Sonic Youth song you can imagine.
The album cover consisted of a cropped Polaroid photograph of two unidentified fans taken at a Sonic Youth show in Amherst, Massachusetts, in April 1995, during a short tour undertaken while the album was still in production. The fans are depicted wearing T-shirts that were sold as merchandise during that tour; early in 1995, the band considered changing their name to Washing Machine. Visible on the shirt on the left are signatures by Thalia Zedek and Chris Brokaw of the tour's opening band Come. The photo was taken by Gordon, who believed it could be used as the album cover. The band liked the shot, but the record label did not want to use it without permission from the fans. Because the band did not have any way to contact them, their faces had to be cropped out.
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