As ‘BUSY BEE’ a weaves in a pattern of Kim Gordon and her Free Kitten bandmate Julia Cafritz co-hosting MTV’s Seashore Home, a sentence reverberates by way of its clattering noise: “The strain to chill out, it was simply an excessive amount of for her.” Certain sufficient, Dave Grohl’s drums thunder again in, resuming PLAY ME‘s gnarly circulate. ‘BYE BYE’, a spotlight from the Sonic Youth co-founder’s earlier solo album The Collective, spawned TikTok movies of teenagers going by way of their very own packing listing, as Gordon chaotically did on that observe – are you able to think about occurring trip today, she now appears to say, not to mention having fun with it? The strain to make music for “chillin’ after work,” as she places it on the opening observe, is an excessive amount of for Gordon – so she soundtracks the doomscrolling, the mind fog, the post-All the things. Shorter and extra spontaneous than its predecessor, PLAY ME‘s restlessness is sort of simply as fruitful.
1. PLAY ME
The album slithers into view with a cavernous bassline that stops it from being slotted into the identical playlists it lampoons: “Wealthy Standard Woman,” “Villain Mode,” “Jazz within the Background,” “Prepared for Spring.” With its March 11 launch and horn samples, the opening title observe flirts with assimilation – would possibly as effectively succumb to it – however Gordon is just too humorous for her curated sensuality to be interpreted as something however a joke. You may chill to this music, perhaps, however you’ll be able to’t chill the fuck out of it.
2. GIRL WITH A LOOK
A drifting synth towards a motorik beat performs out a gendered dynamic: a woman with a glance, a boy with a glance. Now that the vibes have been algorhythmically augmented, all that’s left is a human desperation: “Swingin’ me round/ Dance with me.” The blearier the document sounds, the extra earnest it feels.
3. NO HANDS
Gordon stirs issues up once more, returning to a clanging rhythm she simply instructions. She additionally ups the abstraction, although it’s not exhausting to guess who these with “No fingers on the wheel, it’s a steal” is perhaps. Neither her vocals nor Raisen’s manufacturing veers off target, although, remaining brisk and pointed.
4. BLACK OUT
‘BLACK OUT’ precedes the equally themed early single ‘DIRTY TECH’, a type of lurching prologue that finds her intoning, “I’m the queen of your coronary heart/ Ace of your spade/ You don’t trump me/ I trump you.” Extra than simply apocalyptically well timed, it feels present-day pressing, which could have one thing to do with why it cuts itself brief.
5. DIRTY TECH
Armed with probably the most infectious beat on the album, ‘DIRTY TECH’ highlights the impossibility of really uplifting know-how. What might flatten its attract greater than listening to the phrases “Speak soiled tech to me”? I fear for many who won’t hear the smirk, or learn between the traces – “the subplot,” as she places it.
6. NOT TODAY
After ‘GIRL WITH A LOOK’, the second most offline tune on PLAY ME can also be its most affecting, as Gordon repeats the road, “There’s a gap in my coronary heart.” Instead of an ethereal synth are thickly coated guitars, a new-wave haze cluttering the mandatory ahead propulsion. On ‘NOT TODAY’, Gordon is aching, distracted, euphoric, and blurring the road between all of them. “By no means thoughts the mess,” she sings, the type you don’t even discover amidst a burning chaos.
7. BUSY BEE
The downright finest tune on the album fittingly busies itself with a thunderous rhythm part – that includes none apart from Dave Grohl on drums — a pattern of an interview along with her Free Kitten bandmate Julia Cafritz; and a hook absurd sufficient to offset among the document’s extra easy ones.
8. SQUARE JAW
As if energized by ‘BUSY BEE’, Gordon is extra abrasive in her vocals, itching for brand new methods as a substitute 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 fairly exhausting.
9. SUBCON
Gordon’s satire is extra scattered on ‘SUBCON’, name-dropping all the things from 3D printing to Substack. It’s undoubtedly the most on-line tune on the document, the sonic equal of subtweeting Musk whereas scrolling by way of the All the things app.
10. POST EMPIRE
Like ‘NO HANDS’, ‘POST EMPIRE’ might use a bit extra subtlety, particularly because it retains up the phantasm of cryptic messaging. “Love what you’ve performed with the empire” is a memorable line, however as a complete the tune doesn’t add a lot to the document.
11. NAIL BITER
Raisen by some means boosts the rattling bass much more, exhibiting that he’s been tempering it for some time. Gordon, in the meantime, zooms out a bit of, buying and selling her newest tech takes for a extra basic anti-consumerist angle. However the identical horror, accented by Raisen’s nightmarish synths and sampled distortion, pervades: itching for extra would possibly briefly really feel like an out-of-body expertise, however it is going to at all times convey you down.
12. BYEBYE25!
As a standalone observe or bonus minimize, ‘BYEBYE25!’ can be high-quality, however because the nearer of PLAY ME, this remodeling of The Collective’s standout unusually frames the brand new document as a extra politically charged replace – when it’s really a definite, if a bit slighter, physique of labor. Repurposing a listing of phrases banned from federal web sites by the Trump administration, therein rendering it much less weirdly private than the unique, additionally results in a clumsier tune. But it surely turns into inconceivable to disregard that the 2 information have been born from the identical stressed way of thinking, and as a pair, Gordon and Raisen actually aren’t working out of concepts. They only preserve absorbing extra of what’s in entrance of them.
