Life was good in 2019 when former Sonic Youth frontwoman Kim Gordon released her solo debut, No Home Record. Playing it in the car on the way to school meant playing it for every passerby on the sidewalk, as its sound is so angular and disquieting that even with the volume turned way down, its bassy shudder and percussive jabs still speared through thin air like thunder and lightning. On every song, Gordon’s soft murmurs or pained croaks are backlit by a smattering of vibrant flashes of noise or dim, eerie drones: the trap creep of “Paprika Pony,” the clattering haunted house knocks of “Murdered Out,” the crescendo of feedback quiver and slinking trip-hop on the murky “Get Yr Life Back.” Each track makes distinct excursions into different genres that serve to augment the album’s eclectic, coarse aesthetic.
With her newest release, The Collective, Gordon dials the volume way up, dropping an even more vibrant and stimulating assemblage of sonic palettes and textures. It’s as if Gordon took No Home Record, an album whose whole is lesser than the sum of its parts, and mashed every song together into a sublation of brash aesthetics that hypnotically hiss and whir every which way. There are no quiet ones and loud ones on The Collective — they are all loud, and they all drone on, oftentimes smudging out Gordon’s slam poetry, which (when discernible) consists of day-to-day errands, travel shopping lists and recollections of the humdrum. The murky projection of her voice enhances the dissociated, brain fog-inducing frenzy of the album, though this is not its main selling point.
Listeners will return to The Collective for its sound, a hodgepodge of Playboi Carti’s repetitive, bass-clipped trap with the droning, sprawling feedback and instrumental loops of The Velvet Underground at their most experimental. “I Don’t Miss My Mind” fuses lumbering, dragged-out percussive kicks with industrial feedback whines to form a neurotic, Nine Inch Nails-esque horror machine. “It’s Dark Inside” features the collision of blown-out, pugilistic shots of bass with surges of rattles and shakes and squawks engulfed in a tsunami of electric guitar.
That’s not to say the lyrics aren’t worth mentioning, though overshadowed by the clamorous production. “I’m A Man” caricatures toxic masculinity: Puffing her chest out, Gordon loudly proclaims “giddy up, giddy up!” and “don’t make me have to hide” amid glossy, menacing walls of sound. Gordon goes shopping in “Psychedelic Orgasm,” in which her internet addiction has bled into her everyday life: She muses over the mundanity of her day, observing kids “TikTok-ing around.” She half-jokingly repeats “L.A. is an art scene,” satirizing Los Angeles’s tawdry grandeur, before she lists different psychedelics she sees and ruminates over, undercutting her colorless observations with her own dopamine-starved quest.
Gordon perfectly encapsulates the pervasive, paranoiac loneliness felt from social media on “Shelf Warmer,” in which she argues with her lover over a gift given to her, claiming that it was a self-centered gesture. Suddenly, the track shifts from standoffish remarks to touch-deprived pleas: “Kiss me, kiss me.” Gordon fiends like an addict, removed from the alluring glare of a bright, blue screen.
The Collective is a great album with sonics that belong on an amazing stereo system and nothing less. Though if Gordon intended to enlighten listeners with her spoken word, she should be fairly disappointed. But considering the volatility of the album and the short-form content fixation that inspired it, she probably won’t care either way.
Daily Arts Writer Zachary Taglia can be reached at ztaglia@umich.edu.