“Come on, play me,” Kim Gordon sings on “Play Me,” the title track and opener of her latest album. The song’s suite of groovy sampled horns sounds like the memory of being in a car, windows down, driving around aimlessly in the summertime and staring at the sun and the clouds until your vision becomes a kaleidoscope of colors. You let yourself fall into the tape hiss noise and the signature sound of Gordon sing-talking about “make-out jams” and inviting you to “feel free.” Everything is amazing.
On Play Me, her third solo album, out now, Gordon does indeed feel freer. If her last album, 2024’s critically acclaimed The Collective, had the feeling of giant machines barreling over the landscape, with its strident bass that low-key blew out your speakers every time you blasted it, on Play Me, the 72-year-old artist has made herself at home in the detritus as she confronts the realities of living in America.
But maybe the most surprising thing this time around is how darkly funny her lyrics are. When she re-recorded her 2024 song “Bye Bye,” Gordon replaced its lyrics—which were half to-do list, half modern take on the Joan Didion packing list (“Cigarettes for Keller, call the vet, call the groomer, call the dog-sitter” and “sleeping pills, sneakers, boots, black dress”)—with words stigmatized by our current administration: “Trauma, privilege, uterus, men who have sеx with men, measles, pеanut allergy, abortion.” The result is funny, in the you-can-laugh-or-you-can-cry sort of way. Elsewhere, on “SUBCON,” she sings: “A house is not a home / it’s a dream / a mirage,” before turning it around on anyone intent to keep on dreaming, asking: “You wanna go to Mars… and then what? Then what? Then what?”
“The ‘Play Me’ lyrics are all made up [from the names] of Spotify playlists,” Gordon tells me, sitting inside a nondescript conference room at the Condé Nast offices—perhaps the least punk-rock place for our interview to take place. “I have a serious face, but there’s a lot of humor in the lyrics.”
She is wearing a white button-down shirt (done all the way up), a gray pinstriped blazer, skinny blue jeans, and black rounded square-toe boots. While it’s true that her gaze is as steely as ever, she’s also affable.
“Busy Bee” kicks off with a sample from a 1994 episode of MTV Beach House, in which a very pregnant Gordon and her Free Kitten bandmate Julie Cafritz are hanging out and promoting their latest release, except their voices are distorted to sound like they’re mice on helium. “It’s funny, and then it also kind of references something that’s so old,” Gordon explains, “but people are into the ’90s.” Speaking of the ’90s, Dave Grohl happens to play drums on the song.
She’s poised to have a busy-bee rest of the year. Not only is Gordon going on tour, but she also has three exhibitions opening internationally: there’s “Count Your Chickens,” a survey of her drawings, ceramics, paintings, and readymades since 2007, which will open at Amant in Brooklyn on March 19; “Stories for a Body,” on view at the Collection Lambert in Avignon, France; and another show opening in June at 303 Gallery, which represents her work in New York.
That’s not to say that she hasn’t already been living through a busy couple of years. Gordon’s been working with producer Julian Raisen since the release of 2019’s No Home Record, her first solo project after three decades in the influential rock band Sonic Youth. With each new release, they’ve created a space for Gordon to expand and experiment with the things that make her such a unique performer and songwriter.
“I told him that on this record, I wanted to have more beats on it, and I think he wanted to make my vocals more front and center,” she says of their process. “We both wanted to make the songs short—it’s true that people have short attention spans—but I still think of it in terms of an album. I never really think super conceptually about it, but this really seemed to have a through line to it.”
She spent most of last year touring The Collective, playing with a live band—including Sarah Register on guitar, Camilla Charlesworth on bass, and Madi Vogt on drums—that had the energy of punk basement shows while transmitting the album’s raw, industrial/trap beats. Not only did the record end up on several best-of-the-year lists, but it was also nominated for both best alternative music album and best alternative music performance (for “Bye Bye”) at the Grammys.
She says she is still processing the nominations. “The Grammys are something that exemplifies to me the music industry, and it’s something that has a life outside of the music life I’ve always had, and it’s just to be taken seriously,” she says with a chuckle. “But it was flattering to be recognized in a wider sense.” She attended the awards with her daughter, the writer and poet Coco Gordon Moore, wearing a black Celine tuxedo accessorized with a glittery devil-horns headband.
Gordon continues: “Afterwards, my daughter said, ‘Well, that was an interesting experience.’”
