Kim Gordon has made a noisy experimental electronic album leaps ahead of the year 2024 at the age of 70 with The Collective. This shouldn’t surprise anyone since she’s had her pulse on shaping the future since forever, but coming out of 2019’s amazing solo debut, No Home Record, perhaps there’s an even more jaw-dropping audacity of the multi-threat artist icon to further fracture her sound away from the many past lives on its follow-up. Blistering riffs and blown-out amps still tear through its fabric, but really, it’s Gordon’s endless pursuit of reinvention through her art that constitutes the one constant fingerprint in her sonic influence. Her lens on grotesque observations of pop culture gives listeners much to consider as she — and the album’s cover art — flip into selfie mode to embark on a deconstruction of digital self-currency. Throughout, she assumes various personas — toxic, basic, vapid and superficial energies in part born from the plasticine Los Angeles backdrop she calls home — and assembles their forms through beat-driven sensory clicks produced by Justin Raisen made of droning industrial and post-witchhouse aesthetics clashing against razor-bladed guitars. The album’s fashions are subtle nods to whatever hits virality these days, but in a distorted rendering of them as if to bastardize the nature of today’s over-curation through her transmission. Somehow, it’s a statement on the loss of something wholly of the individual, yet altogether very Kim Gordon. Atop of its slate, she deadpans lyrics that project blunt, obtuse stream-of-conscious abstractions. It’s powerful smartdumb method that focalizes the eroded soundscapes behind them. With society in decay, moving backwards, becoming more artificial, detached, uglier, and — more than anything, self-absorbed — in part because of a corrosive digital effect, The Collective is like taking a snapshot of this timeline and splattering it across bare white walls in a gallery. This is the soundtrack to what it means to live in a world where everything and nothing is made to be content as the true self disappears.

Highlights: “BYE BYE”, “I Don’t Miss My Mind”, “Psychedelic Orgasm”

Kim Gordon’s The Collective is available now on Matador Records.

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