Kim Gordon’s vision of art and noise has come sharper into focus just as readily as it has changed—a paradigm of possibility that, four decades on, still feels like a dare. The adventure continues on the artist’s third solo album, »Play Me«, which will be released March 13. The lead track »Not Today« is available now, accompanied by a short film directed by Rodarte fashion label founders and filmmakers Kate and Laura Mulleavy with director of photography Christopher Blauvelt. The song brings out a poetic tension in Gordon’s voice. »I started singing in a way I hadn’t sung in a long time,« she says. »This other voice came out.«

For the video, Gordon wears a hand-dyed silk tulle dress from an early Rodarte collection, custom-made for her by the Mulleavys. »She was our idol and we vividly remember fitting the dress with her in NYC,« they said. »When we started to conceptualize the video, Kim brought up wearing the dress, which we knew was perfect for the video idea.«

»Play Me« is distilled and immediate, expanding Gordon’s sonic palette to include more melodic beats and the motorik drive of krautrock. »We wanted the songs to be short,« Gordon says of her continued collaboration with LA producer Justin Raisen (Charli XCX, Sky Ferreira, Yves Tumor). »We wanted to do it really fast. It’s more focused, and maybe more confident. I always kind of work off of rhythms, and I knew I wanted it to be even more beat-oriented than the last one. Justin really gets my voice and my lyrics and he understands how I work—that came forth even more on this record.«

In 2019, Gordon’s debut solo LP »No Home Record« proved she was attuned as ever to vanguard sounds, mixing avant-rap and footwork into her sonic conceptual art. »The Collective«, in 2024, was brick-heavy and even more daring, led by the tectonic industrial clatter of her packing-list-cum-rage-rap banger »Bye Bye« and earning two Grammy nominations.

The fast-following »Play Me« processes, in Gordon’s inimitable way, the collateral damage of the billionaire class: the demolition of democracy, technocratic end-times fascism, the A.I.-fueled chill-vibes flattening of culture—where dark humor voices the absurdity of modern life. But despite its frequent outward gaze, »Play Me« is an interior record, one in which a heightened emotionality pulses through physical jams, rejecting definitive statements in favor of an inquisitiveness that keeps Gordon searching, ever in process. Amid »Play Me«’s rabbit-hole reality bricolage, pitch-shifted vocals and shadowy layers of dissonance, Gordon’s songs are still clear about the attention they pay to a world that would rather distract us into oblivion. »I have to say, the thing that influenced me most was the news. We are in some kind of ‘post empire’ now, where people just disappear,« she says, echoing the title of one of »Play Me«’s selections.

The taut skitter and screech of »No Hands« contains the recklessness of the national mood. The quaking bass and free-associative verses of »Subcon« suggest the bleak atomization of life in the platform era, before taunting would-be space colonizers: »You want to go Mars / And then what?« »Square Jaw« indicts Elon Musk’s divisive toxic masculinity by describing the visual blight of Tesla trucks. Narrating a person’s ominous total embrace of tech, »Dirty Tech« pities A.I.’s human victims who fail to recognize its environmental havoc. »I was kind of musing about, is my next boss going to be an AI chatbot?« Gordon says. »We’re the first ones whose lights are going to go out—not the tech billionaires. It’s so abstract that people can’t comprehend.« In using her own abstract language to describe reality, she begins to clarify it.

Dark humor voices the absurdity of modern life. »Busy Bee« warps a sample of Gordon talking with her Free Kitten bandmate Julia Cafritz during a ’90s media appearance, tweaking their conversation into high-pitched squeaks (Dave Grohl plays drums) to air seemingly contemporary sentiments (»the pressure to relax, it was just too much for her«).

A work of timely opposition art, »ByeBye25« remakes Gordon’s »The Collective« opener with new lyrics repurposed from Trump’s banned-words list—terms the administration has flagged to cancel grant and research proposals. The terms range from »they/them«, »climate change«, and »uterus« to »bird flu«, »peanut allergy«, and »tile drainage«, becoming, like many »Play Me« tracks, dryly hilarious.

The title track sets the names of Spotify playlists over a trip-hop groove. »Rich Popular Girl / Villain Mode / Jazz in the Background / Chilling After Work,« Gordon intones in her sprechgesang—another ridiculous list, the edges of each phrase melted like Gordon’s dripping Noise Paintings, representing the tyranny of frictionless culture. »It’s sort of part and parcel of the convenience culture that we live in, where our choices are kind of curated all the time,« Gordon says. »Things are branded in a way that tries to predict what your mood is before you have a mood. I find that interesting, and also really offensive.«