PLAY ME is the third solo album from Kim Gordon since she began releasing albums under her own name and her name alone with 2018’s genre-breaking experiment No Home Record. Given that she’s worked with producer Justin Raisen — known for his work with some of the cooler, darker inhabitants from the alternative pop spectrum over the past decade like Charli XCX, Sky Ferreira, and Yves Tumor — alongside a common thread between each concentrating on beat-heavy impulses and the decay of culture thanks to real life villainry and technological brain rot, it’s naturally given way to calling them alongside the standout 2024 intersect, The Collective, a thing of trilogy.

That works in theory. Gordon’s consistency in collaborative company as well as their close proximity with one another practically invite that, but with PLAY ME, it etches a distinct feature into each’s mood board that gives way to three separate stylistic personas. On No Home Record, it was the collapse of noise-rock, no wave, and violent electronic music onto one another while holding Gordon’s past lives in Sonic Youth or more recently, Body/Head, close by. The Collective broke free from all of that, venturing hard into the experimental trap-pop fringe and in turn, made her more kindred to today’s Internet rap weirdos than her own alt-rock god peers.

PLAY ME has moments that extend from those rupturing points, but ultimately feels less like the noise from the outside and rather, the interiors of the headspace which many of us find ourselves in these days. We see the end of everything on the horizon, and while we do what we can to resist it, we’re just being swept up in the whirring white noise of it all.

That’s most apparent within the dazed soul cycle of “PLAY ME” as well as the hyper dream-pop supercrushes of “GIRL WITH A LOOK” and “NOT TODAY”. Occasionally, something horrible shocks us back into being fully cognizant with our surroundings (the AI enshittification of capitalism through the digi-pop flicker of “DIRTY TECH” or the godless greed noise-punk screed of the Dave Grohl-drummed “BUSY BEE”,) but it’s only temporary before drifting back into our own tattered thoughts — loosely fitted within Gordon’s fragmented, impressionistic lyric stream.

As the album concludes with a politically status updated version of The Collective brain banger “BYE BYE”, it’s delivered less as a warning, and rather, a concession that the culture, as it stands right now, is indeed cooked. Even if it is, PLAY ME signs off in a way that leaves you wanting to hear Gordon’s next turn in her ongoing avant pop desconstruction of it, be it in two years or more. There’s no telling if we’ll still be here by then given the state of this hellscape, but at least Gordon’s cool is keeping the fan on the flames.

Highlights: “PLAY ME”, “GIRL WITH A LOOK”, “BUSY BEE”

Kim Gordon’s PLAY ME is available now on Matador Records.

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