There is an early moment in Girl in a Band (2015), Kim Gordon’s acclaimed (and recently republished) memoir, where she describes her first performance onstage with a short-lived band called Introjection. The trio included Christine Hahn and Miranda Stanton from The Static, and their one and only performance was at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. A musical novice but with art-school smarts, Gordon describes her lyrics as “ad copy I’d torn from women’s magazines” with one song titled “Soft Polished Separates” and another “Cosmopolitan Girl.”With some revision, this improvisational, found-object style that started her career as a musician can still be heard on Gordon’s new album, Play Me (Matador). A lean and brisk LP with twelve tracks at twenty-nine minutes, it extends the hip-hop sound developed on her two previous solo releases, No Home Record (2019) and The Collective (2024), with the assistance of producer Justin Raisen, who has also worked with Charli XCX among many others. Like its music, the album’s lyrics are equally presentist, touching upon AI, Elon Musk, and the Trump administration: you know, the usual late-career subject matter for a canonical singer-songwriter.Gordon is seventy-three years old — for context, Bruce Springsteen is seventy-six and Bob Dylan is eighty-four — though Play Me is far from being a work of reminiscence or nostalgia. It is, in Gordon’s characteristically experimental way, a political album. Unlike Springsteen, whose response to the fatal Immigration and Customs Enforcement shootings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti was the familiar-feeling “Streets of Minneapolis,” or Dylan, whose recent album Rough and Rowdy Ways (2020) had a seventeen-minute retelling of John F. Kennedy’s assassination (“Murder Most Foul”), Gordon is not inclined to rehash her earlier work or wax poetic on precedents for our current moment.Play Me asks instead what political songwriting might look like…
