Kim Gordon - Play Me

At 72, Kim Gordon is still finding new ways to sound unsettled. Play Me, her third solo album and second collaboration in a row with producer Justin Raisen, follows 2024's The Collective, the record that earned her first two Grammy nominations, for Best Alternative Music Album and Best Alternative Music Performance. Where The Collective leaned into thick, industrial noise, Play Me tightens things down to their essentials: barely half an hour of music, most songs clocking in under three minutes, built from trap vocals, motorik rhythm, and Raisen's glitchy electronics. "We wanted the songs to be short," Gordon has said. "We wanted to do it really fast. It's more focused, and maybe more confident."

That focus doesn't mean the record pulls its punches. Gordon spends the album picking apart the absurdity of the current moment, from the hollowing out of democratic institutions to the flattening, algorithmic sameness of AI-generated culture, delivering it all with the same dry, deadpan humor that's defined her writing since Sonic Youth. "Not Today," the lead single, finds her actually singing for the first time in years, in a Rodarte-designed dress for a music video directed by the Mulleavy sisters. "Dirty Tech" turns anxiety about artificial intelligence into a wiry trap song, and "Busy Bee" splices Dave Grohl's drumming under a sped-up conversation between Gordon and her old Free Kitten bandmate Julia Cafritz, lifted from a 1990s MTV Beach House appearance.

Critics met Play Me as a left turn even by Gordon's standards, unpredictable and jarring in a way that felt entirely suited to the moment it was made in. Mastered by Mike Bozzi at Bernie Grundman Mastering and released through Matador, this is the sound of one of rock's most restless minds refusing to settle down, still searching, still in process, decades into a career built on doing exactly that.