Four decades into a career defined by an unwavering commitment to the avant-garde, Kim Gordon has once again defied the gravitational pull of heritage-act nostalgia. Her third solo album, ‘Play Me,’ is not just a sequel to the tectonic industrial noise of 2024’s excellent ‘The Collective’; it is an evolution that finds Gordon pivoting toward a stripped-back and urgently tactile sonic architecture. Working with longtime producer Justin Raisen, Gordon exchanges the industrial sprawl of her previous work for the relentless, mechanical pulse of krautrock and motorik rhythms. To achieve this visceral, un-digital urgency, Raisen utilized a suite of vintage analog synthesizers including the EMS VCS 3 and the Sequential Circuits Prophet-5, processing them through archaic tape-loops to ensure every frequency feels lived-in and abrasive.
The record’s DNA is inextricably linked to Gordon’s “Noise Paintings” series, where lyrics and catchphrases are dripped in jagged, graffiti-like textures onto canvas. This collision of the verbal and the visual informs the melted quality of the opening title track, “Play Me.” Over a deep ’70s-inspired groove, Gordon dryly intones the names of curated Spotify playlists like “Villain Mode,” “Rich Popular Girl,” and “Jazz in the Background,” critiquing a world where digital branding attempts to predict our emotions before we even have them. Much like her Twitter Paintings explored the passive ways we consume identity online, this critique of cultural flattening flows seamlessly into the rhythmic one-two punch of “Girl With a Look” and “No Hands,” where the latter’s taut skitter captures the recklessness of the national mood.
The album’s aesthetic remains deeply connected to Gordon’s broader fascination with technology as a contemporary deity whose influence saturates the record’s second half. Much like her previous visual explorations of digital voids, the music on ‘Play Me’ frames our entangled relationship with mobile devices as a modern religion. In the atmospheric “Black Out” and the biting “Dirty Tech,” she confronts the social fallout of the digital age, pitying the human victims of automation while the billionaire class remains insulated. This tension reaches a peak at the record’s midpoint with “Not Today,” a single where Gordon breaks out a melodic singing voice she hasn’t used in years. This poetic tension reveals a vulnerability that anchors the album’s heightened emotionality, mirrored by a surreal visual collaboration with Rodarte founders Kate and Laura Mulleavy.
The dreamlike quality is immediately countered by the motorik drive of “Busy Bee,” featuring Dave Grohl on drums. The song warps a vintage 1990s media appearance with Gordon and her Free Kitten bandmate Julia Cafritz, tweaking their voices into high-pitched squeaks to mock the performative cult of mandatory self-care that defines the digital age. As the album enters its final act, Gordon targets broader power structures in “Subcon” and the jagged “Square Jaw,” indicting space colonization and the visual blight of Tesla trucks as symbols of toxic masculinity. The skeletal “Post Empire” and the nervous “Nail Biter” reflect a world of unstable systems before concluding with “ByeBye25!,” a radical reimagining of her previous album’s opener. Rather than a list of household items, Gordon recites words recently targeted by political censorship such as “climate change,” “injustice,” and “they/them,” transforming erasure into a dryly hilarious act of resistance. By blending motorik drive with this sharp, interior emotionality, Gordon has created a paradigm of possibility that remains perpetually in process.
Learn more by visiting: Matador Records and Bandcamp.
