Kim Gordon
Play Me
MATADOR
Her 2015 memoir Girl in a Band notwithstanding, Kim Gordon has reliably steered clear of nostalgia. That’s particularly true in her career as a solo artist; since the disbanding of Sonic Youth she has doggedly avoided resting on her laurels, shying away from the kinds of return-to-roots albums so common to songwriters in their sixties and seventies. Then again, for an artist as restless as Gordon, what would a return to her roots even sound like? She’s 72 now, and her music has never been pricklier, more conversant with contemporary aesthetics, more attuned to the shifts of the culture around her.
Her latest is Play Me, and it feels a bit like a matching bookend for The Collective, her raw and abrasive record from 2024. Both albums were made with producer Justin Raisen, who has also worked with the likes of Charli XCX and Yves Tumor, and both find Gordon fully embracing the trashy internet aesthetic of the SoundCloud era as she raps, sings, and occasionally shreds over steely hip-hop beats and industrial clatter. This is not the sound of a veteran artist straining for contemporary relevance; rather, it’s the sound of an artist who’s inspired by the cutting edge, and who is uniquely gifted at wrestling mainstream sounds into something avant-garde.
Because it picks up sonic and aesthetic threads from The Collective, Play Me doesn’t carry quite the same thrill of discovery; it’s also true that there’s nothing here that feels quite as indelible as “Bye Bye,” the blistering art-trap banger that served as The Collective’s signature song. But Gordon sounds more comfortable than ever mining cacophony for moments of tension and release, nimbly navigating the space between blown-out bass, shards of noisy guitar, and clattering beats. “Black Out” and “No Hands” immediately rank among her steeliest flirtations with trap music, and her touch is just as deft on “Not Today,” a surprisingly tuneful excursion into pulsing synthpop.
Gordon has an unconventional songwriting style that’s less about narrative or confession and more about litanies and lists. She’s said she views her art from a sociological perspective, desiring to illuminate the times—think of her as one of the old WPA photographers whose job was to capture the effects of the Depression in stark black and white. On Play Me, she offers crisp images of an empire imploding at the behest of tech billionaires. “Dirty Tech” rattles off the environmental consequences of AI, a timely addition to public backlash against data centers. “Square Jaw” lampoons tech-bro masculinity, its controlling image the appalling ugliness of the Cybertruck.
And then there’s “Bye Bye 25!,” which updates her earlier song by simply listing words and phrases banned by the Trump administration: climate change, bird flu, uterus. Sure, Gordon is hilarious, but she also understands that the work of bearing witness is no laughing matter.
