- Matador
- 2026
Kim Gordon could not be serious. Yet not only was she not kidding, she had taken a concept that sounded like a punchline and turned it into a project as vital as it was vexing.
The Sonic Youth co-founder took a jarring left turn with 2024's The Collective, and album that found her rasping free-associative poetry over production that blurred brainrot rage rap with experimental noise. It was a brilliant reinvention at the dawn of her eighth decade, an album where what could have been a gimmick — haha Kim Gordon rapping on Playboi Carti type beats, haha — yielded thrilling, rewarding music. In a fragmented flurry of consumerism, sensuality, and toxic character sketches, Gordon's stint as a pseudo-emcee captured something salient about our hollowed-out society. Also, it slapped. How could this improbable exercise result in a creative statement this substantial? And where would Gordon go next?
On PLAY ME, out this week, she treads similar ground but certainly doesn't run in place. Paired once again with producer Justin Raisen, her closest collaborator since launching her post-Sonic Youth solo career with 2019's No Home Record, Gordon once again spends much of the album holding court over hip-hop beats. PLAY ME is not a mere accessory to The Collective and by no means a retread. The albums are best understood as equal companions. They're in conversation to the point that The Collective opener "BYE BYE" is revamped here with a new assortment of free-associative hot-button lyrics to close out the tracklist as "BYEBYE25!" Yet Gordon frequently ventures beyond the common parameters of hip-hop here, and even some of the rap beats she chose represent different sides of the genre.
The title track makes that clear right away. "PLAY ME" opens the album with moody booming bass, regal/funky horn samples that drift through the track like pollution in the city skies, and slow-rolling boom-bap drums verging on trip-hop. "Play me makeout jams," Gordon's trembling voice begins, continuing the sexual role playing that popped up on the last album. "Turn out the lights/ Neon cowgirl/ You like Easy Rider/ '70s hippies." The skittering "SQUARE JAW," with its threats of a sucker punch and its command to "put your lips together," keeps threatening to break out into a drum 'n' bass break; instead we get some wordless staccato "ah ah ah ah" that shows Gordon still trying out new vocal techniques at this late date. The playacting resumes on the single "DIRTY TECH," where Gordon steps into an office environment to beckon the boss "I like it when you talk dirty tech to me" over a chintzy keyboard-based loop something like interdimensional "Hotline Bling."
Our creeping tech dystopia is one of Gordon's pet topics here, and not just the way it has invaded the corporate space. She name-checks Substack and 3D printing on the ominous, bass-bombed "SUBCON," one of many songs on which her lyrical stream of references feels like drowning in a social media feed, where so many alarming and amusing components are juxtaposed without context. "They wanna go to Mars," she sings, gesturing in Elon Musk's general direction. "And then what?" The spooky trap lurch "BLACK OUT" finds declaring, "I'm the queen of your heart/ Ace of your spade/ You don't trump me/ I trump you," right after moaning "AI, AI" in Auto-Tune.
As with The Collective's "I'm A Man," the topical flashes may strike some listeners as overbearingly blunt. But Gordon sells them with the same unflappable conviction and charisma she's been delivering on record since the '80s, and like so much of the best art, she keeps her precise meaning slippery enough to get you thinking rather than telling you how to think. Not that many people will be struggling to interpret "POST EMPIRE" when Gordon dryly intones, "Love what you've done with the empire," but her quick-and-to-the-point language keeps her protest music from tumbling into Facebook-lefty polemics and braindead sloganeering.
Gordon's engagement with rap production remains surprisingly fruitful, but some of the best moments on PLAY ME are the ones that break from the mean. "GIRL WITH A LOOK" smears ethereal keyboards over a brisk, upbeat rhythm track; I can imagine Ezra Koenig singing dainty melodies over it, but Gordon's cries and bellows carry it somewhere entirely different. Similar bleary, droning propulsion kicks in on lead single "NOT TODAY," probably the most Sonic-Youth-esque track here (think "Jams Run Free"), another scramble of sensuality and capitalism that lives up to its own half-serious dictum: "Make it feel so good."
Perhaps most noteworthy, at least for the way it connects Gordon's past to her present, is "BUSY BEE." The track's collage of thunderous noise includes drums by Dave Grohl and pitched-up dialogue snippets from an episode of MTV Beach House hosted by Gordon and her Free Kitten bandmate Julia Cafritz. "Hey didn't you used to be in a band called STP?" Gordon asks, teeing up Cafritz for the reply, "Yeah, those boys are lucky that we broke up before they got big or they'd have a lawsuit on their hands." Threaded in alongside Gordon's current aesthetic and lyrical fixations, the blasts from the past are a reminder of just how long she's been doing this.
How long will she keep doing this, specifically, though? Gordon’s recent run has me thinking back to Sun Kil Moon’s mid-2010s releases Benji and Universal Themes, when the pre-disgraced Mark Kozelek radically altered his songwriting and performance style, trading out yearning slowcore melodies in favor of diaristic talk-singing. The approach was indulgent but also often powerfully moving — and then Kozelek ran it into the ground, to the point that it felt like self-parody when he released an album called This Is My Dinner. Long before extensive misconduct allegations exiled him to the fringes of the music industry, a significant chunk of his audience had stopped paying attention because they were bored.
With that creative decline in mind, several more albums in the mold of The Collective and PLAY ME could easily sap the electricity out of a creative turn that, so far, has been such a pleasant surprise. Despite its satisfyingly ramped-up guitar assault, "BYEBYE25!" may be the sound of this idea running its course. Hopefully it's also the sound of the circuit being completed. I'm heartened by the theory that the two tracks work as parentheses on this phase of Gordon's career — a signal that, unlike Kozelek, she's wise enough to move on before a fresh idea gets stale. Having dropped two stunning late-career works upon us, I expect she'll forge ahead into her next phase. That said, if these records have taught us anything, it's that Kim Gordon is not beholden to our expectations, and when she flouts them, the results can be delightful.
PLAY ME is out 3/13 on Matador.
Other albums of note out this week:
• The physical release of Johnny Blue Skies & The Dark Clouds' Mutiny After Midnight
• James Blake's Trying Times
• Elucid & Sebb Bash's I Guess You Had To Be There
• Alexis Taylor's Paris In The Spring
• Sweet Pill's Still There’s A Glow
• Anjimile's You're Free To Go
• Jack Harlow's Monica
• Morgan Nagler's I’ve Got Nothing To Lose, And I’m Losing It
• The Notwist's News From Planet Zombie
• The Orielles' Only You Left
• Tinariwen's Hoggar
• White Reaper's Only Slightly Expanded
• Bruiser Wolf's Push & Paint
• Cut Worms' Transmitter
• The Black Crowes' A Pound Of Feathers
• Bill Orcutt's Music In Continuous Motion
• Shop Talk's Shop Talk
• Mt Fog's Every Stone Is Green
• Fotocrime's Security
• Lamb Of God's Into Oblivion
• GRRL's Beetle
• Will Graefe & Spencer Zahn's I Envy Light
• LANY's Soft 2
• Ora Cogan's Hard Hearted Woman
• NO/MÁS' No Peace
• Art School Girlfriend's Lean In
• TRAITRS' Possessor
• n0trixx's A Catalogue Of Madness And Melancholia
• midori jaeger's ‘(Un)planted’ EP
• Jason P. Woodbury's Jason P. Woodbury And The Night Bird Singing Quartet
• Brigitte Calls Me Baby's Irreversible
• Magnolia Park's Nights After VAMP
• Soft Machine's Thirteen
• The Scratch's Pull Like A Dog
• Mary Ocher's Weimar
• Haute & Freddy's Big Disgrace
• Crack Cloud's Peace And Purpose
• Shoreline's Is This The Low Point Or The Moment After?
• Chris Lippincott's Angel In A Jetstream
• Foy Vance's The Wake
• Bound In Fear's A Mind Too Sick To Heal
• The Sophs' Goldstar
• Powerplant's Bridge Of Sacrifice
• Bentley Anderson's Valence
• Simo Cell & Abdullah Miniawy's Dying is the internet
• Hetta Falzon's Henrietta EP
• VASSIŁINA's i.par.ksia.ko
• Cat Clyde's Mud Blood Bone
• UNITYTX's Somewhere, In Between…
• Dead Air's World Wide Villainy
• Lia Pappas-Kemps' Winged
• The Fray's A Light That Waits
• Flowers/Ghosts&Echoes' Flow////State
• Sweet Petunia's Foggy Mountain Mental Breakdown
• Delphine Dora's l'ineluctable pulsation du temps
• Unchosen Ones' Divine Power Flowing
• Sella's Well I Mean
• Blessing Jolie's 20nothing
• Votive's An Infinite Capacity For Joy
• ladylike's It's A Pleasure Of Mine, To Know You're Fine
• Jai'Len Josey's Serial Romantic
• Steven Dove & Gian Battaglia's scend
• Leven Kali's LK99
• Chalk's Crystalpunk
• Colton Bowlin's Grandpa’s Mill
• Quarters' I HOPE THIS ISN'T THE END OF THE WORLD
• Wallie The Sensei's Madd Dogg
• Close Enemies' Close Enemies
• Steve Blanco's Shadow Arc Suite
• Vicious Rain's The Anatomy Of Surviving
• TRUEANDTRUE's prayin’ with the boys
• Struggle Jennings' Last Name
• instant crush's I'M SORRY I DIDN'T BITE MY TONGUE (Deluxe)
• Laurel Halo's Midnight Zone (Original Soundtrack To The Film By Julian Charrière)
• Rush's Grace Under Pressure (40th Anniversary Edition)
• Jonas Brothers' Friends From Your Hometown Live Album
• PUP's Megacity Madness (The Official Live Recordings)
• Cashier’s The Weight EP
• Cubzoa's Cubzoa Vs Icebeing EP
• Sun Spots' Dog Is Calling EP
• Amy Gadiaga's BabyGoated EP
• googly eyes' paint me like one of your fav american girls EP
• Cailin Russo’s Don't EP
• Hollow Suns' Back To Dust EP
• Terrence Dixon's When Stars Remember EP
