Review: KIM GORDON

Kim-Gordon-PLAY-ME-album-2026

Kim Althea Gordon, born in 1953, has no intention of being embalmed in the pantheon of alternative rock.

Where her peers recline in the golden glare of a monumental legacy, she chooses creative self-cannibalism and once again looks forward.

“Play Me” is not a record: it is an autopsy report on our digital psyche, a work that exudes the malaise of compulsive doomscrolling.

Gordon, led by alchemist Justin Raisen, definitively abandons orthodox structures and elaborates, in her inimitable style, the collateral damage caused by the billionaire class: the demolition of democracy, the technocratic fascism of the end times, the flattening of culture fueled by artificial intelligence, where dark humor gives voice to the absurdity of modern life.

Songs like Blackout they're not songs, it's dark, dystopian trap where redemption is an obsolete concept, buried under layers of synthetic distortion. It's the soundtrack to a fragmented mind watching society's collapse through the cracks of a smartphone.

There are many songs that express this malaise. In Post Empire and in the chilling BYE BYE 25!Gordon updates the dissonances of the previous “The Collective”, while in SQUARE JAW or SUBCON It would make any rap rookie struggling with bars and beats pale.

Its language becomes a political battleground: a litany of ostracized terms “Diversity, tribal, transgender, Hispanic, green” that are spewed like bullets at contemporary cultural regression. There is no fawning nostalgia; there is only the present, naked and unpleasant.

Among the sonic convergences also the presence of Dave Grohl on drums in Busy Bee. His percussiveness is so processed and stripped down as to be unrecognizable, superimposed on an accelerated sampling that sees Kim dialogue with the specter of Free Kitten. It's the album's modus operandi: dismantling the simulacra of the past to illuminate the rubble of today.

A nervous, edgy, coherent record, often more conceptual than emotional. But also proof that the experimental attitude, when authentic, knows no age.

TO LISTEN NOW

DIRTY TECH – NOT TODAY – SQUARE JAW -SUBCON

TO BE SKIPPED IMMEDIATELY

It's a bomb of dystopian energy.

SCORE: SCORE 8.00

THE VOTES OF OTHERS

Uncut – Rating 9.00
Classic Rock Magazine – Rating 8.00
The Times – Rating 8.00
Clash Music – Rating 8.00
New Musical Express (NME) – Rating 8.00
Mojo – Rating 8.00
Pitchfork – Rating 7.00