NEW YORK -- Ten years ago, Kim Gordon — a revolutionary force in the alternative rock band Sonic Youth, the ’80s New York no wave scene and the space between art and noise — debuted solo music.At the time, she was already decades into a celebrated, mixed-medium creative career.
The midtempo “Murdered Out” was her first single, where clangorous, overdubbed guitars met the unmistakable rasp of her deadpan intonations.It was a surprise from an experimentalist well-versed in the unexpected: The song took inspiration from Los Angeles car culture, and its main collaborator was the producer Justin Raisen, then best known for his pop work with Sky Ferreira and Charli XCX.
Their partnership has continued in the decade since, and on March 13, Gordon will drop her third solo album, “Play Me,” announced Wednesday alongside the release of a hazy, transcendent single, “Not Today.”“It was a happy accident,” she says of her continued work with Raisen.“In the beginning, I was somewhat skeptical of working with a producer and collaborator, really.
But it’s turned out to be incredibly freeing.”“Play Me” follows Gordon's critically lauded, beat-heavy 2024 album “The Collective,” a noisy body of work that featured oddball trap blasts.It earned her two Grammy nominations — a career first — for alternative music album and alternative music performance.
Those were for the song “Bye Bye,” with its eerie, dissonant beat originally written for rapper Playboi Carti.For “Play Me,” Gordon reimagined the track for the closer, “Bye Bye 25!” She says it was the result of her thinking about the rap world, where revisiting and remixing is commonplace.
“I came up with the idea of using these words that Trump had sort of ‘banned’ in his mind,” she says of the new song's lyrics.(An example: “Injustice / Opportunity / Dietary guidelines / Housing for the future.” President Donald Trump’s administration associates the terms with diver...