ALBUM REVIEW: Kim Gordon – Play Me

Matador

Released: 13.03.26

Kim Gordon’s recent solo outings have taken her to some fairly unexpected places that even the most ardent fan would struggle to recognise her in. My initial points of reference for the title, and opening track of the album are elastic, early 00s trip-hop augmented through Black Box Recorder; it has a similar sort of cut and paste approach to 2024’s The Collective, though generally deals in a less abrasive, if no less neurotic, sonic landscape.

Made with producer justin Raisen, and touching bases everywhere between trap and industrial music, it’s a painfully, disorientating contemporary record: BYEBYE25! is ostensibly a cut and paste of words flagged by the Trump administration married to a nightmarish soundscape; Busy Bee, featuring Dave Grohl on drums, captures the atmosphere of the record most succinctly – breathless, disorientating and paranoid. It’s a concise record at just under half an hour, but you can’t help but feel like you’ve been through a tumble dryer in that process. It marks Gordon, now in her early seventies and having been producing trailblazing work for the best part of half a century, as an artist decidedly operating in the present and producing art in the purest form.