Y
ou might think you know Kim Gordon. After all, she’s been a rock legend for more than four decades now, since rising out of the New York punk underground in the band Sonic Youth. She became a feminist icon with her fearsome charisma and art-school sensibility, helping to inspire the Nineties riot-grrrl revolution. She’s got a legend to uphold, laurels she could rest on. But listen to her amazing new Play Me and the question can’t be avoided: What if Kim Gordon is just getting started?
After Sonic Youth broke up in 2011, Gordon focused on her early vocation of visual art while playing in the experimental noise duo Body/Head. But she took a bold leap in 2016, teaming up with L.A. producer Justin Raisen. It was an unexpected collaboration that raised eyebrows, since he’s best known for working with pop artists like Charli XCX and Sky Ferreira. But his approach turned out to be the ideal match for her total-trash aesthetic.
“I didn’t have a desire to make a solo record,” Gordon says. “I did guitar-bass music for so long. I had no plans on doing anything other than Body/Head and making art when I moved back to L.A. It was Justin — he talked me into a solo record.” But to her surprise, she enjoyed it. “It was kind of a happy accident that he’s a good collaborator. He just keeps the engine going.”
Their chemistry blew up on the superb 2024 album The Collective, her most startling — and fun — project in years. It was unmistakably a rock album, flashy and aggressive and bombastic, yet it all unfolded over trap beats, including one originally intended for Playboi Carti. Even longtime fans were shook right down to their dirty boots.
Play Me, out this month, hits even harder, leaning on the electro-distorted rhythms and her power-sneer voice. It’s full of savagely funny satire about modern American culture. “There’s a lot of humor in it,” she says. “A lot that’s pissed off.” In the title tune, she recites the names of mood-themed Spotify playlists, from “rich popular girl” to “jazz in the background” to “chilling after work.” “Busy Bee” warps a snippet of dialogue between Gordon and her bandmate Julia Cafritz from the 1990s indie project Free Kitten, with Dave Grohl pounding the drums. The dialogue comes from an episode of MTV’s Beach House that she and Cafritz guest-hosted. “I spent Justin that clip of us talking, and he sped it up,” Gordon says. “Kennedy was the VJ. For some reason they asked us to host, so we were just sitting around talking about the decorations.”
Gordon is a famously shy and private person — during the entire conversation with Rolling Stone, she never removes her shades. As she describes in her 2015 memoir, Girl in a Band, she was always that way. Yet somehow she managed to scream her way into people’s heads on Sonic Youth classics like “Flower,” “Shadow of a Doubt,” “Bull in the Heather,” and “The Sprawl.”
In the Eighties, Gordon wrote an Artforum essay with a famous line about rock performers: “People pay to see others believe in themselves.” Does she still feel that way? “Oh, yeah — definitely,” she says. “People love someone who has confidence. But strangely, also, the opposite is true. You could be somebody who’s incredibly awkward onstage, and doesn’t do the sort of typical ‘I’m in control’ presence. I find that more interesting in a way. Taking things that aren’t working, but then you make them work.”
Gordon was deeply influenced by the rock performers who had that kind of impact on her. She mentions Mark E. Smith of the U.K. post-punk band the Fall, “although he didn’t really care,” and Chan Marshall, a.k.a. Cat Power: “I mean, she had such devoted fans that even when she was not able to finish a song, they always still came back. There’s a certain things-falling-apart aspect to live performance that can make it interesting. Even Nirvana — although that was a pretty nihilistic part of the shows, but I kind of enjoyed that aspect…. Something like that can break through the expectations.”
One of her weirdest gifts to rock & roll culture has turned out to be one of her most enduring — a T-shirt. In the Nineties, Gordon wore a shirt with a provocative slogan that’s taken on a life of its own: “Girls Invented Punk Rock, Not England.” Where did that come from? “It’s funny — I said that in an interview, in England or something, and then someone made that T-shirt and threw it onstage. And I wore it.”
Play Me feels like punk rock, even in its industrial-strength beats. “One thing I like about working with Justin is that he likes to make trash,” she says. “I’m actually not using rock tropes in the traditional way. I’m not using big power chords.” The music brings out the hip-hop sensibility in her voice — which goes back to Sonic Youth’s 1990 classic “Kool Thing,” where she debated Public Enemy on “male white corporate oppression.” “I don’t have the kind of voice to be a singer-singer, and I get really inspired by rhythm and beats. Occasionally a melody will pop out of somewhere accidentally, but this kind of vocal just feels most natural for me.”
Gordon has often said she thinks of herself as more of a visual artist than a musician, and so much of her music has the mix-and-match collage sensibility of her visual art. “With Sonic Youth, we used to joke about that all the time in interviews,” she recalls with a smile. “When people would say, ‘You make art music,’ we would joke and say, ‘Oh, yeah — we’re sculpting.’ We would just take the piss out of it. But it’s really just me being a visual thinker, and thinking of the music in terms of a sense of space.”
She still thinks that way. “I see the music I’m making now as really — without sounding pretentious — it is kind of my art, in a way. It’s not really aspiring to be anything else.” Yet that might be how she keeps a sense of discovery alive. As she says, “I’m just curious what comes out.”
