“Come on, play me,” Kim Gordon sings on “Play Me,” the title monitor and opener of her newest album. The track’s suite of groovy sampled horns sounds just like the reminiscence of being in a automotive, home windows down, driving round aimlessly within the summertime and staring on the solar and the clouds till your imaginative and prescient turns into a kaleidoscope of colours. You let your self fall into the tape hiss noise and the signature sound of Gordon sing-talking about “make-out jams” and alluring you to “be at liberty.” All the pieces is wonderful.
On Play Me, her third solo album, out now, Gordon does certainly really feel freer. If her final album, 2024’s critically acclaimed The Collective, had the sensation of big machines barreling over the panorama, with its strident bass that low-key blew out your audio system each time you blasted it, on Play Me, the 72-year-old artist has made herself at residence within the detritus as she confronts the realities of dwelling in America.
However possibly probably the most shocking factor this time round is how darkly humorous her lyrics are. When she re-recorded her 2024 track “Bye Bye,” Gordon changed its lyrics—which had been half to-do checklist, half fashionable tackle the Joan Didion packing checklist (“Cigarettes for Keller, name the vet, name the groomer, name the dog-sitter” and “sleeping tablets, sneakers, boots, black costume”)—with phrases stigmatized by our present administration: “Trauma, privilege, uterus, males who’ve sеx with males, measles, pеanut allergy, abortion.” The result’s humorous, within the you-can-laugh-or-you-can-cry type of approach. Elsewhere, on “SUBCON,” she sings: “A home shouldn’t be a house / it’s a dream / a mirage,” earlier than turning it round on anybody intent to maintain on dreaming, asking: “You wanna go to Mars… after which what? Then what? Then what?”
