Audiopile Review: Sonic Youth legend Kim Gordon has long been one of the coolest people in rock. On her second solo album, ‘The Collective’ she reaches Dean Martin levels of cool melting into sheer ennui. The opening single ‘BYE BYE’ is essentially just her reciting a packing list over some distorted beats. Kim Gordon is clearly not in the least bit bothered about putting a lot of work into impressing you. The fact that ‘BYE BYE’ sounds breathtakingly awesome just goes to show how cool and brilliant she is. The rest of the album follows this Kim-drawling-over-beats formula, which you may remember from her excellent solo debut, ‘No Home Record’. This time around, while she sounds more nonchalant than ever, the beats are much noisier and occasionally bracingly chaotic. Clearly, there’s anger under the ennui. The strongly electronic flavour of Kim Gordon’s solo work may be a surprise to the palate of some Sonic Youth connoisseurs. But ‘The Collective’ does a great job of keeping that band’s true spirit and aesthetic simmering away.

Legendary musician and multi-disciplinary artist Kim Gordon returns with her second solo album, The Collective, which will be released March 8th on Matador. Recorded in her native Los Angeles, The Collective follows Gordon’s 2019 full-length debut No Home Record and continues her col- laboration with producer Justin Raisen
(Lil Yachty, John Cale, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Charli XCX, Yves Tumor), with additional production from Anthony Paul Lopez. The album advances their joint world building, with Raisin’s damaged, blown out dub and trap constructions playing the foil to Gordon’s intuitive word collages and hooky mantras, which conjure communication, commercial sublimation and sensory overload.

“On this record, I wanted to express the abso- lute craziness I feel around me right now,” says Gordon. “This is a moment when nobody really knows what truth is, when facts don’t necessarily sway people, when everyone has their own side, creating a general sense of paranoia. To soothe, to dream, escape with drugs, TV shows, shopping, the internet, everything is easy, smooth, conve- nient, branded. It made me want to disrupt, to follow something unknown, maybe even to fail.”