Kim Gordon is 72 and she is making some of the most genuinely unnerving music of her career. PLAY ME is noisy, confrontational, and deeply strange in ways that feel earned rather than performed. This is not an elder stateswoman gracefully aging into her legacy. This is someone still actively trying to break things.
The album builds on the digital noise experiments of her previous work but goes further into abrasion. Vocals are processed until they’re barely recognizable as such. Beats are broken and reassembled in ways that suggest less interest in rhythm than in rhythm’s ruins. There are moments that sit somewhere between industrial music and the more aggressive edges of contemporary hyperpop – which is not a comparison I’d make lightly about a woman who was making noise rock when most hyperpop artists were in elementary school.
What makes PLAY ME work as an album rather than an art object is that Gordon’s conceptual clarity always kept it human. The record has a perspective, even when the sounds are deliberately anti-melodic. It’s angry in a specific way, and that specificity is what separates it from pure provocation.
Stereogum’s Album of the Week nod feels right for something this pointed. This won’t be everyone’s record – the accessibility ceiling is genuinely low – but for listeners willing to meet it on its own terms, PLAY ME is one of the braver records made by anyone this year.
Gordon has nothing left to prove. She proves things anyway.
