As ‘BUSY BEE’ a weaves in a sample of Kim Gordon and her Free Kitten bandmate Julia Cafritz co-hosting MTV’s Beach House, a sentence reverberates through its clattering noise: “The pressure to relax, it was just too much for her.” Sure enough, Dave Grohl’s drums thunder back in, resuming PLAY ME‘s gnarly flow. ‘BYE BYE’, a highlight from the Sonic Youth co-founder’s previous solo album The Collective, spawned TikTok videos of teens going through their own packing list, as Gordon chaotically did on that track – can you imagine going on vacation these days, she now seems to say, let alone enjoying it? The pressure to make music for “chillin’ after work,” as she puts it on the opening track, is too much for Gordon – so she soundtracks the doomscrolling, the brain fog, the post-Everything. Shorter and more spontaneous than its predecessor, PLAY ME‘s restlessness is nearly just as fruitful.
1. PLAY ME
The album slithers into view with a cavernous bassline that prevents it from being slotted into the same playlists it lampoons: “Rich Popular Girl,” “Villain Mode,” “Jazz in the Background,” “Ready for Spring.” With its March 11 release and horn samples, the opening title track flirts with assimilation – might as well succumb to it – but Gordon is too funny for her curated sensuality to be interpreted as anything but a joke. You can chill to this music, maybe, but you can’t chill the fuck out of it.
2. GIRL WITH A LOOK
A drifting synth against a motorik beat plays out a gendered dynamic: a girl with a look, a boy with a look. Now that the vibes have been algorhythmically augmented, all that’s left is a human desperation: “Swingin’ me around/ Dance with me.” The blearier the record sounds, the more earnest it feels.
3. NO HANDS
Gordon stirs things up again, returning to a clanging rhythm she easily commands. She also ups the abstraction, though it’s not hard to guess who those with “No hands on the wheel, it’s a steal” might be. Neither her vocals nor Raisen’s production veers off course, though, remaining brisk and pointed.
4. BLACK OUT
‘BLACK OUT’ precedes the similarly themed early single ‘DIRTY TECH’, a kind of lurching prologue that finds her intoning, “I’m the queen of your heart/ Ace of your spade/ You don’t trump me/ I trump you.” More than just apocalyptically timely, it feels present-day urgent, which might have something to do with why it cuts itself short.
5. DIRTY TECH
Armed with the most infectious beat on the album, ‘DIRTY TECH’ highlights the impossibility of truly uplifting technology. What could flatten its allure more than hearing the words “Talk dirty tech to me”? I worry for those who might not hear the smirk, or read between the lines – “the subplot,” as she puts it.
6. NOT TODAY
After ‘GIRL WITH A LOOK’, the second most offline song on PLAY ME is also its most affecting, as Gordon repeats the line, “There’s a hole in my heart.” In place of an ethereal synth are thickly coated guitars, a new-wave haze cluttering the necessary forward propulsion. On ‘NOT TODAY’, Gordon is aching, distracted, euphoric, and blurring the line between them all. “Never mind the mess,” she sings, the kind you don’t even notice amidst a burning chaos.
7. BUSY BEE
The downright best song on the album fittingly busies itself with a thunderous rhythm section – featuring none other than Dave Grohl on drums — a sample of an interview with her Free Kitten bandmate Julia Cafritz; and a hook absurd enough to offset some of the record’s more straightforward ones.
8. SQUARE JAW
As if energized by ‘BUSY BEE’, Gordon is more abrasive in her vocals, itching for new tricks instead of falling into sprechgesang cliche. Having weaponized her mastery of the senses, she flat-out threatens to “sucker punch” Elon Musk with emasculating precision. It lands pretty hard.
9. SUBCON
Gordon’s satire is more scattered on ‘SUBCON’, name-dropping everything from 3D printing to Substack. It’s definitely the most online song on the record, the sonic equivalent of subtweeting Musk while scrolling through the Everything app.
10. POST EMPIRE
Like ‘NO HANDS’, ‘POST EMPIRE’ could use a bit more subtlety, especially as it keeps up the illusion of cryptic messaging. “Love what you’ve done with the empire” is a memorable line, but as a whole the song doesn’t add much to the record.
11. NAIL BITER
Raisen somehow boosts the rattling bass even more, showing that he’s been tempering it for a while. Gordon, meanwhile, zooms out a little, trading her latest tech takes for a more classic anti-consumerist angle. But the same horror, accented by Raisen’s nightmarish synths and sampled distortion, pervades: itching for more might briefly feel like an out-of-body experience, but it will always bring you down.
12. BYEBYE25!
As a standalone track or bonus cut, ‘BYEBYE25!’ would be fine, but as the closer of PLAY ME, this reworking of The Collective’s standout strangely frames the new record as a more politically charged update – when it’s actually a distinct, if a bit slighter, body of work. Repurposing a list of words banned from federal websites by the Trump administration, therein rendering it less weirdly personal than the original, also leads to a clumsier song. But it becomes impossible to ignore that the two records were born from the same restless frame of mind, and as a pair, Gordon and Raisen certainly aren’t running out of ideas. They just keep absorbing more of what’s in front of them.
