Kim Gordon, the musician, artist and cofounder of the pioneering alternative-rock band Sonic Youth, would prefer that you not call her an icon. She is speaking from a hotel room in Minneapolis during the first week of the tour for her new album, Play Me, her hair bleached and her eyeliner smudged, wearing a white button-down with the collar half popped and several chunky gold chains. She looks the part, but part of her appeal is her refusal of that language.
“To me, being an icon is sort of a static state, like you’ve totally arrived,” she says. “There’s a finality to it, and that makes me uncomfortable.” That unwillingness to declare herself arrived persists even for someone whose career helped shape decades of alternative music.
Play Me picks up where her previous record, The Collective, left off, leaning into elements of trap and 1990s hip-hop. Its lineage runs through an aggressively fuzzed-out beat that the album’s producer, Justin Raisen, had originally intended to send to the rapper Playboi Carti; instead it went viral, spreading across TikTok and onto critics’ end-of-year lists.
Her process is built around rhythm rather than melody. “I like beats,” she says. “I’m not a natural singer, and I get inspired by rhythm and beats, and Justin is really good at that. I’d tell him what I want, and he would make beats and then send them to me. And then I’d go in and improvise guitar stuff and make lyrics.” The method keeps her music loose and reactive rather than composed in the conventional sense.
Alongside the album, Gordon has rededicated herself to her visual art practice. She has always considered herself an artist who happens to make music rather than the reverse, and her artwork returns to obsessions that have run through her music too: California cool and New York mess, the use of negative space, a fascination with the detritus of pop culture, and a kind of poker-faced humor.
Taken together, the new record and the renewed art practice read as a late-career flowering for a figure who has spent decades resisting easy summary. Rather than settling into legacy, Gordon frames both pursuits as ongoing experiments, driven by curiosity and a distrust of the sense that any of it is finished.
