Kim Gordon’s solo career (which didn’t start until she was 66) has been extremely fruitful as 2019’s No Home Record began her collaboration with producer/multi-instrumentalist Justin Raisen, and 2024’s The Collective is one of the best albums of this fractured decade. The pair’s third effort is PLAY ME. While not as exciting as those offerings, it still manages to fuse Gordon’s haunting vocals around overdriven beats in a unique fashion.
Leaning more into a hip-hop vibe than she ever has before in her career, Gordon let the fuzzy beats flow, but where on The Collective these sounds were jarring, nightmarish, pounding, and relentless, PLAY ME is more restrained and even pleasant. That difference can be heard on an effort like “NAIL BITER,” which starts with speaker cracking power but then shifts to a trap-influenced beat that is a bit more digestible.
At times, things are blissfully pretty. The opening title track is a slow rolling gem that uses a horn-laced beat that Digable Planets could have rhymed around in the late 90’s. “POST EMPIRE” deploys a squiggly riff, warbling synths, and an off-kilter funk, while the neon-laced “NOT TODAY” finds Gordon gorgeously dipping into New Wave with a driving sound, slightly distorted synths, and fuzzy guitars supporting her most emotional vocals on the album.
Her singing can be an acquired taste and doesn’t always match Raisen’s sounds. “GIRL WITH A LOOK” is an electro-dance party, but Gordon’s vocals seem more punk rock-focused and yearning, while the samples and singing on “BUSY BEE” never seem to fully coalesce into more than a patchwork of sounds.
Better is when Gordon takes lyrical inspiration from current events and the 24-hour news cycle. Both “BLACK OUT”, about AI, and the self-explanatory “DIRTY TECH” find her confidently narrating this stage of world decline with a distrustful eye around modern hip-hop beats. Never one to shy away from toxic masculinity, which Gordon has been chronicling her whole career, both the stutteringly aggressive “SQUAREJAW” and the ominous booming of “SUBCON” are targeted at Elon Musk and his followers.
Gordon still dips into her art-rock past as Raisen amps the experimental clanging for “NO HANDS,” which can still be danced to. The album ends on the heaviest noise rock note as Gordon and Raisen bid adieu to last year by revisiting The Collective’s opener via “BYEBYE25!”. Overdriven feedback, slamming beats, and new lyrics repurposed from a banned-words list—terms the current American administration has flagged to cancel grant and research proposals, keep the track vibrantly alive and evolving.
All along her journey Gordon has stayed creative and punk, now working for the third time with a like-minded artist in Raisen, PLAY ME continues their string of intriguing music.
