Kim Gordon’s new album, PLAY ME, is released today and continues her interest in a sound that largely eschews any real resemblance to the exploits of her former band, Sonic Youth. Instead, over the last seven years and two previous albums, No Home Record (2019) and The Collective (2024) (both excellent), Gordon has turned her attention to devising a highly unique sonic palette, drawing from experimental electronic music, noise, hip hop, trap, industrial, and a little bit of rock. For many, this extreme shift toward what could generally be defined as hip hop might still come as something of a shock. But it’s worth remembering that Sonic Youth’s biggest commercial hit, Kool Thing (1990), featured guest vocals from Public Enemy’s Chuck D alongside Gordon herself.
Of the tracks on offer here that vaguely resemble rock, both Girl with a Look and Not Today are highlights. The former rides a comforting shoegaze-style whirr of phased, distorted guitar accompanied by a propulsive, dance-inspired rhythm, it’s the coming together of two complimentary directions in music that are often merged, yet one that rather than attempt replicate, Gordon delivers something new and inventive. Those dreamy guitar tones (which, it must be said, Sonic Youth helped pioneer) return on the sublime Not Today, a buzzing psychedelic drift of a track that seems to hover just above the surface, floating, drifting, yet never without intent or direction. It’s certainly the closest Gordon has come as a solo artist to anything resembling the sound of Sonic Youth.
The real charms of PLAY ME, however, lie in the more hip hop and electronic-inspired material. Throughout the album, Gordon offers numerous extreme yet precise variations in texture and tone, as fragments, samples, and bursts of experimental noise-rock are interpolated with rough-edged DIY beats one might find on a hip hop beat tape. The brevity of some tracks also hints at a mixtape-like approach to the album’s construction. The opening track, the jazz-tinged hip hop of Play Me, which features the repeated motif of its title, recalls perhaps the most famous beat tape of them all, J Dilla’s acclaimed Donuts, particularly the track Workinonit, which features a similar spoken-word hook.
As with that landmark of hip hop, the tracks on PLAY ME are frequently packed with multiple textural, rhythmic, and melodic ideas that shift and mutate at unexpected intervals, like flicking through TV channels in a rhythmic fashion, or perhaps, more appropriately for today’s audience, swiping endlessly through social media feeds. Doomscrolling, essentially. Gordon’s use of vocals that are often built around repeated phrases and statements that feel intuitively snatched and fixated upon in a stream-of-consciousness manner, heightens this sense of constant stimulus and dissolving reality, forming an abstract critique of a dystopian, influencer-dominated age.
Monstrous, powerful men, corporations and the contemporary tools of their determined destruction are also frequent targets, most openly on the bleak, apocalyptic hip hop of Black Out and the growling, bass-heavy, ghost-house pummelling of Subcon. While Dirty Tech, released as a promo ahead of the album, is built upon around a minimal, almost west coast rap foundation, here Gordon appropriates and subverts the sonic language of gangsta rap in a critique of what many might consider the real gangsters of today.
While PLAY ME is primarily concerned with glitchy, heavily processed electronic instrumentation, its spirit shares a lot in common with what I imagine were, and maybe still are, Gordon’s formative influences. The boundary-breaking dub-punk of The Slits, the avant-garde free post-punk of bands like The Raincoats and Kleenex, and the New York No Wave scene from which Sonic Youth originally emerged. The result is a genuinely unique melting pot of sound, full of playfulness and unpredictability.
PLAY ME is a dark, frantic whirlwind of an album, but not without a captivating playfulness. It stands as another magnificent addition to Gordon’s already abundant back catalogue, the sound of an artist, and a veteran of independent music, facing the future with an unwavering gaze and an engaged mindset, producing some of the most immediate and compelling work of her remarkable forty-five-year career.
Kim Gordon - PLAY ME is out now on White Vinyl, Black Vinyl & CD
