PLAY ME

Kim Gordon — 2026

“At 72, Kim Gordon isn’t looking back and PLAY ME makes sure you aren’t either.”

Kim Gordon spent most of her career as a founding member of Sonic Youth, the New York noise rock band that shaped underground music from the early 1980s through 2011. After the band split up, she kept working, first with the duo Body/Head, then launching a solo run in 2016 that nobody quite saw coming. Her 2019 debut, No Home Record, showed she was paying close attention to new sounds. Then The Collective arrived in 2024 and caught even longtime fans off guard with its damaged, blown-out dub, and trap constructions.

PLAY ME is her third solo album and the third made with L.A. producer Justin Raisen. It clocks in under 30 minutes and covers a lot of ground fast. The record takes aim at tech billionaires, AI culture, Trump-era censorship, and the way streaming platforms quietly shape what we feel and when. It is sharp, funny in a dry way, and genuinely unsettling in spots. Gordon says the news was her biggest influence here, and you can hear it in every track.

The record starts with the title track that has a low-riding groove and after-hours horn lines that feel more California than Manhattan, while glitchy percussion and corroded electronics tap into hip hop and trap. Raisen’s production sounds like someone channel surfing during a system crash. But PLAY ME also brings in krautrock rhythms and some actual singing, which sets it apart from The Collective. “NOT TODAY” has a shoegaze-leaning guitar under Gordon’s voice. The whole record moves between those two poles. Either beats-heavy and beat-up on one side or something a little more open and melodic on the other.

PLAY ME isn’t simply an extension of her last record; the two albums are better viewed as companion records that play off one another. Where The Collective was more locked into noise-rap and industrial clatter, this one pulls back just enough to let some breathing room in. Gordon starts actually singing again, something she had stepped away from for years. The krautrock influence is real as several tracks have that locked-in motorik pulse that keeps things moving even when the lyrics are heavy. It is a small but clear shift from where things stood two years ago.

Fans of PJ Harvey’s more confrontational work will definitely enjoy PLAY ME, particularly the way Gordon uses her voice as a blunt object rather than an instrument of melody. Dry Cleaning comes to mind too with both acts use spoken-word style vocals over tightly wound post-punk grooves to describe the weirdness of daily life. Early Suicide is a reference point as well. Yves Tumor’s more abrasive moments are in the same territory, and the industrial end of the record has traces of early-period Nine Inch Nails, though stripped of the drama.

“DIRTY TECH” stands out as the record’s most biting track. A pulsing FM synth bass underpins Gordon as she takes on the role of someone gleefully answering to an AI boss, delivering “Hey boss, terminatin’ with a steady hand” with a mix of humor and unease. “BYEBYE25!” closes the record by rebuilding the Collective opener with words pulled from the Trump administration’s list of banned grant terms. “BUSY BEE” warps a 1990s MTV clip of Gordon and Free Kitten bandmate Julia Cafritz into something that sounds almost unrecognizable as Dave Grohl’s drumming actually becomes unrecognizable with its synthetic injection. “SUBCON” builds off a heavy bass line with Gordon tossing out references to Substack and 3D printing before landing on “You want to go to Mars / And then what?” which I think is probably the best single line on the whole album.

Gordon rarely makes a direct statement. Instead, she stacks images and phrases until a picture forms on its own. It works because she never over-explains. Musk, AI, surveillance capitalism, and political censorship are clearly in the crosshairs, yet they are framed less as looming threats and more as comical figures blind to the spectacle they’ve become. Even though so many times Kim’s words are blips and quickly delivered they still turn out to be very powerful.

PLAY ME is lean, quick, and more focused than anything Gordon has released in recent memory. It does not waste your time. I did find it a little abrupt sometimes as a few tracks feel like they stop right when they are getting interesting. There is also a reasonable argument that this style has a ceiling. That said, Gordon earns the benefit of the doubt here. She has consistently moved before an idea goes stale, and nothing on PLAY ME sounds like someone running out of things to say. At 72 she is still finding new angles, new sounds, and new things worth being angry about.