Kim Gordon : PLAY ME
If you’re reading this, you probably don’t need me to explain to you who Kim Gordon is. As part of Sonic Youth, she became known as one of the defining bassists of her generation, thanks to a series of epoch-defining albums like Daydream Nation, Goo, and Washing Machine. With her recent slate of solo material, however, she has incorporated elements of electronica and trap on her first two solo albums, No Home Record and The Collective, a pattern she continues to pursue on the latter’s follow-up, PLAY ME.
Gordon’s third solo LP opens with the catchy, toe-tapping title track, which recalls upbeat trip-hop acts from the late ’90s like Morcheeba. The chorus samples some chilled brass which is laid over some scratching in a way that’s both pleasurable and listenable. However, this is followed by a “GIRL WITH A LOOK,” which is built around a loop that feels disorienting and employed with repetition that instills a slightly nauseous feeling. “NO HANDS,” meanwhile, sees a welcome partial return of the sort of solid guitar riffing that characterized Gordon’s work with Sonic Youth.
A statement accompanying the album makes clear that the dystopia currently being wrought by artificial intelligence is a key theme of the album. Critiques of this societal development are to be applauded in the current climate, and I am all for people making them. However, the distorted warble on “BLACK OUT” feels a little lacking in terms of contributing a unique viewpoint to the discourse, and making the phrase “AI” itself effectively the entire chorus of a song feels a little on the nose. “DIRTY TECH,” which follows it, is similarly heavy handed in its treatment of the same subject, with lyrics like “Are you my white-collar service worker?” Yet “NOT TODAY” makes for a satisfying conclusion to the album’s first side, dominated as it is by spacey synths and buzzsaw guitars.
Songs in the album’s back half like “BUSY BEE,” “SQUARE JAW,” and “SUBCON” are dominated by hip-hop beats, and hearing the voice behind alt-rock classics like “Death Valley ‘69” and “Tunic (Song for Karen)” sing over them can be a little jarring, even if it’s not her first time doing so. The chorus of “SUBCON” is similar to that of “BLACK OUT” lyrically, with Gordon repeating buzzwords like “sub-prime” over and over. The song’s trudging pace is given some much-needed levity by the introduction of a roaring guitar just over halfway through.
Gordon’s voice blends with the beats better on “POST EMPIRE” and “NAIL BITER,” perhaps because the guitar being relatively high up in the mix helps to mitigate the incongruence between vocals and arrangement. The roaring guitar continues throughout the album’s closing song, “BYEBYE25!,” but again, the lyrics consist of Gordon intoning phrases presumably intended to allude to issue-oriented keywords like “electric vehicle,” “pregnant person,” “transgender,” and “hate speech.” All of which are important enough issues that it would have been interesting to hear Gordon go a little deeper, but here they’re just standalone phrases.
PLAY ME is, if not consistently enjoyable, still a fascinating piece of work. It’s always good to hear new music from a living legend (and in my case, someone whose music I’ve been listening to since I was 16), check in with them, and find out what is currently capturing their interest. However, the abiding feeling that I got from PLAY ME was of an artist putting a little too much emphasis on trending topics. This is evident from the proliferation of artificial, synthetic-sounding programming techniques, and the lyrics that introduce issues dominating our societal discourse at the most literal level possible without adding anything more substantive. The album does, at the very least, demonstrate Kim Gordon’s continuing refusal to coast on former glories and her willingness to experiment with sounds that set us off balance.
Label: Matador
Year: 2026
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