Mar 24, 2026
3 min read
The founder of legendary New York band Sonic Youth releases 'Play Me', his third solo album."I have always worked more as a sociologist than an artist," he says.
Kim Gordon, or how to be a rock legend and scourge of Trump at 72 years old
The founder of the legendary New York band Sonic Youth releases “Play Me”, her third solo album. “I have always worked more as a sociologist than as an artist,” she says.
Kim Gordon (New York, 72) has almost certainly never heard of educator Francisco Giner de los Rios, founder of the Free Learning Institute, but she fully agrees with his desire to be "more radical and clean-shirted every day" over the years.At an age when many choose to rest and live off the earnings of their legend, the New York alternative rock and Sonic Youth co-founder with Tython Moore has released his third solo album.
Play Me contains 12 songs, where the listener will know Gordon's arrangement from the first chord.They do not have the dirty dirt and the sound of noise, nihilistic and destructive rock of the eighties and nineties, the artist has become a musical example that everyone wants to experience and many women want to try.Since he collaborated with Justin Risen, a New York musician based in California who specializes in rap and electronic music, his songs have a rhythmic and hypnotic rhythm that emerged, helped by Gordon's half-talking, half-singing voice.Along with her husband Moore and guitarist Lee Ranaldo, the artist's bass has been a hallmark of the band for more than two decades.The raw vocals and vocals on the new album reflect Gordon's personality.
When EL PAIS journalists meet him in the cafeteria of a luxurious and modern hotel in central London, the image of classic elegance and delicacy presented by the singer is doubly at odds with the album's content, which, on repeated listens, seems increasingly provocative and more critical.Although he returned to California, the country where he grew up and where he created his character, after the dissolution of Sonic Youth and the dissolution of his marriage, Gordon has not stopped creating."I consider myself a visual artist making music," he justifies.
He wears a navy blue knit jacket with gold buttons and a badge in the side pocket, almost Ralph Lauren-esque, which seems to indicate that Gordon has settled down.He orders tea and submits to the conversation with obvious reluctance.She has always cultivated an image of laziness and apparent disinterest, and of being the coolest person in the room without wanting to, though she defends herself against these definitions and attributes her attitude to "the shyness and introversion that has always accompanied me."
In fact, although with a muffled and slow voice, he does not shy away from any topic of conversation.Donald Trump, Elon Musk, social networks, artificial intelligence, consumerism and the renewed attacks against the so-called note culture, which for her, a symbol of a certain feminism of the last decades, represents a series of conquests that must be defended with the teeth.
Her previous album, The Collection (2024), featured the music video for "Bye Bye" sung by her daughter Coco Gordon Moore.A young woman runs away from home, stays in a motel, or cuts her hair to rebel.But soon, the syncopated rhythm of the singer repeating mundane, mundane and provocative items and tasks into a fictional emergency luggage list turns the song hypnotic."Pajamas, toothpaste, mascara, lipstick, shampoo, dental floss, call the vet, give cigarettes to Gordon's paranoid schizophrenic brother Keller, who published the singer's poem in 2023...jeans, pajamas, Bella Freud, vibrator, vibrator,Vibrator…” wrote.It became a phenomenon on the social network TikTok.Generation Z reconnected with Gordon and wrote that most of the girls changed the list while packing their bags.
On the new album, Gordon includes ByeBye25!It's the same guitar, but with dirt on the back of the guitar.And this time, the singer repeated all the words, ideas or things that angered the authorities and fans who supported Donald Trump for the second term in the White House.
Gordon's aggressive and directly political speech cannot be ruled out, but his brief responses clearly indicate a sense of frustration with the direction his country is taking.His way of dealing with it is less like a hammer but with a fierce tone of provocation;Disdain for everything backward in Trump's policies.
"We wanted the album to sound really fast, more thematic, with more security. I wanted to work with a focus on rhythms, and Justin [Rison, producer] had a really good understanding of my voice and my lyrics, which will be even more different on this album," explains Gordon, every day billionaire technocrats like Elon Musk, Capital Musk, when he comes up with the American album."I've always been more of a sociologist than an artist," he admits to explain his passion for describing the contemporary landscape.A legacy of her father, a professor at the University of California who, in a book in the sixties, described the sociology of teenagers at the time, not knowing that his daughter would become a legacy for many generations to come.
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