The Sonic Youth icon delivers her most focused and beat-driven work yet, arriving 13 March via Matador Records.
Kim Gordon is back with Play Me, her third solo album, set for release on 13 March through Matador Records. Four decades into a career defined by reinvention, the artist continues to push boundaries—this time with a record that’s distilled, immediate, and more melodic than anything on her recent backlog.
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Her single ‘Not Today’ dropped alongside a short film directed by Rodarte founders Kate and Laura Mulleavy, featuring cinematography by Christopher Blauvelt. Gordon wears a hand-dyed silk tulle dress custom-made for her by the Mulleavys from an early Rodarte collection. “She was our idol and we vividly remember fitting the dress with her in NYC,” the designers said.
The track shows off a different side of Gordon’s voice. “I started singing in a way I hadn’t sung in a long time,” she says. “This other voice came out.” That shift carries through Play Me, which leans into more melodic beats and krautrock’s motorik drive.
Gordon reunited with LA producer Justin Raisen (Charli XCX, Sky Ferreira, Yves Tumor) for the album, following their work on 2024’s Grammy-nominated The Collective. “We wanted the songs to be short. We wanted to do it really fast,” Gordon says. “It’s more focused, and maybe more confident. I always kind of work off of rhythms, and I knew I wanted it to be even more beat-oriented than the last one.”
The result processes the chaos of our current moment: the demolition of democracy, AI’s cultural flattening, and technocratic fascism, all through Gordon’s uniquely abstract lens. News coverage heavily influenced the writing. “We are in some kind of ‘post empire’ now, where people just disappear,” she notes.
Tracks like ‘Square Jaw’ take aim at Elon Musk’s toxic masculinity through the visual blight of Tesla trucks, whilst ‘Dirty Tech’ contemplates AI’s human victims and environmental impact. “I was kind of musing about, is my next boss going to be an AI chatbot?” Gordon says. The title track sets Spotify playlist names over a trip-hop groove, critiquing the “tyranny of frictionless culture” where choices are constantly curated.
Dark humour cuts through the doom and gloom. ‘Busy Bee’ warps a sample from a ’90s Free Kitten media appearance with Julia Cafritz into high-pitched squeaks, with Dave Grohl on drums. ‘ByeBye25’ remakes The Collective‘s opener using terms from Trump’s banned-words list for grant proposals—”they/them,” “climate change,” “uterus,” “bird flu,” “peanut allergy”—becoming dryly hilarious opposition art.
Play Me arrives 13 March via Matador Records.
