KIM GORDON - Play Me

We've said it before in other contexts: no one – not even her own former bandmates – could ever have imagined that, of the four members of Sonic Youth, all masters of sonic avant-gardism, it would be Kim Gordon who'd go on to make the most uncompromising solo work (just think of what she recorded as co-lead of the duo Body/Head) and the most open to the sounds of the present day (in the case of the three albums released under her own name). Compared to its predecessors, No Home Record and The Collective, "Play Me" offers drastically less in the way of surprise (Gordon has by now "accustomed" us to what she does), but that's offset by an even clearer, more fully realized vision, thanks to the dissolving of the chaotic industrial-noise component in favor of a deeply urban mood, propped up by a sturdy hip-hop-inflected scaffolding. Hardly a novelty for someone who, back in 1990, blazed a trail by duetting with Chuck D of Public Enemy on "Kool Thing" (from "Goo") and, three years later, with Cypress Hill on "I Love You, Mary Jane," featured on the soundtrack to "Judgement Night," one of the most successful fusions of rock and rap ever attempted.

Of the three albums she's cut under her own name so far, "Play Me" is also the Kim Gordon record with the most pronounced rhythmic backbone, as well as the one completed the fastest: while "No Home Record" seemed like it might never come out, and "The Collective" arrived after a four-and-a-half-year wait, this time it took just two years to reach chapter three. Kim moves fast, in every sense: she's well aware that the average listener's attention span keeps shrinking, she knows that if a piece of writing takes more than two minutes to read nobody will bother, she knows we live in the age of scrolling and hit-and-run consumption, where everything is ultra-fast. With great foresight, she opts to compress her messages and songs, packing twelve of them into a clean thirty minutes, so as never to leave room for boredom. The songs were written once again with producer Justin Raisen, returning to the scene of the crime to tread the territory of mutant electronics, the best possible compass for navigating the rubble of today's digital metropolises.

The bold Kim's angular profile and unflappable gaze remain the center of gravity for her art-rock experimentation: right as many of her peers retreat into revivalism, buried under endless reissues and albums that sound exactly like the last one, she banishes her glorious past to live in the present, getting her hands dirty with trap and drill, deconstructing them and reassembling them according to her own personal aesthetic, trading guitar feedback once and for all for the surgical violence of beats and digital distortion.

Amid super-powerful bass ("Subcon" is a real thrill) and minimalist spoken word, Kim Gordon reads out the closing credits of a civilization in collapse, continuing to play the role of the detached, incisive observer that made her an icon. Don't ever expect linear narratives or emotional confessions from her: her lyrics work like Dadaist collages, fragments of overheard conversations, advertising slogans drained of meaning, snapshots of a hyper-connected reality: she writes as though scrolling through an endless social media feed, with a mix of cynicism, irony and frightening clarity, while all around her the world gradually falls apart. A new manifesto on the decline of the American dream. Verses against consumerism, against Trump, against Musk, against artificial intelligence, against the depersonalizing Spotify playlists, against the flattening of culture in the second millennium.

Kim Gordon has stated that she has no intention of working the way she did in other projects; she wants to chart new paths: she's still the same person, but with a completely different idea of the mission ahead. On "Play Me" she chooses to open with the seductive, nihilistic glamour of the jazzy interference of the title track, and it isn't long before the aggressive beats of "No Hands" and the dark-trap stride of "Black Out" and "Dirty Tech" take center stage.

The only concessions to her 1990s are concentrated in "Busy Bee", between the sped-up sample of a TV conversation between her and Julia Cafritz of Free Kitten and the project's only guest star, Dave Grohl, who lends his hyper-propulsive drumming.

"Not Today" is the only truly rock oriented moment on the tracklist: with its post-punk guitars and a nicely rounded drive, it's exactly the kind of song many fans would have expected from Kim Gordon after Sonic Youth were put on hold. It's one of the standout tracks on "Play Me", Kim Gordon's least disorienting album, yet at the same time the most disorienting one...

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16/03/2026