Kim Gordon, like everyone else, is addicted to her phone. Her vicious and brilliant second solo album, The Collective, shares her name with a painting she exhibited at New York's 303 Gallery last year. 27 iPhone-sized holes had been punched in the canvas, each gap a cute little reminder of every synapse you fried watching parkour clips or chasing the infinite scroll. The album itself is even less subtle: fueled by pounding beats and industrial guitar, anchored by lyrics in which Gordon recites packing lists or mumbles about driving in Los Angeles. The Collective it's a maelstrom of mundane thoughts and funny asides and flashes of pure rage whipped into a heavy, unsettling fog. It sounds like how the TikTok mastermind feels.
It's a provocative but fitting new way for Gordon, who, for more than 40 years, has combined scathing experimental art with a wry curiosity about mainstream culture. For every faintly confrontational side project like Free Kitten, there's a Ciccone Youth, the Sonic Youth alter-ego dedicated to reinterpreting radio confections like “Into the Groove” and “Addicted to Love.” She holds down Body/Head, an elliptical drone-guitar piece with Bill Nace, and serenades Rufus Humphrey and Lily van der Woodsen at their wedding in gossip Girl. On The Collectiveshe puts her trademark witty sprechgesang over what can only be described as a Ken Carson-esque beat, fully diving into the trap experiments she first tried in 2019 No domestic registration; Sometimes, like on the opening track “BYE BYE,” he sounds genuinely like a SoundCloud rapper, nonchalantly picking apart the names of luxury clothing brands: “Bella Freud, Y-small-LARGE, Ex-home-Lat-the.”
No domestic registrationGordon's first solo album after playing in bands for 38 years, it was thematically oblique, but on songs like “Earthquake” and “Murdered Out,” her stoic side slipped, revealing lyrics that felt like stings, unforgiving rebuke to persona non grata. in Gordon's life. The Collective, once again made with alt-pop producer Justin Raisen (Sky Ferreira, Charli XCX), casts aside the arrangement of the score in favor of fractured, stream-of-consciousness lyrics that mostly avoid poetry or diarism. The relentlessly noisy vibe is appealingly impulsive and lizardy, like hearing someone reminding themselves to think: He mutters that he buys overpriced fries and leaves money for the cleaning lady, laying out the phrase “bowling trophies” on the album's closer. of a tune and laments what sounds like religious prophecy in “The Believers.” During recording, Raisen encouraged Gordon to bring her “abstract poetry,” and the resulting album is both dense and refreshing. in “I Don't Miss My Mind”, apart from the furniture of the house they are confronted with a goblin-voiced call to “suck it / fuck it” and a hazy memory of “crying on the subway”. There's no lyric sheet, and many songs are like Rorschach tests asking whether you're listening for elasticity or brokenness, sex or violence, secularism or surrealism. Often, it's hard to tell the difference.
