PLAY ME

The art-rock legend took an unexpected leap in the late 2010s, teaming up with the pop producer Justin Raisen for a series of solo records that reinvented the former Sonic Youth musician as an industrial-trap provocateur. On the pair’s previous collaboration, 2024’s <i>The Collective</i>, Gordon unleashed a maelstrom of stream-of-conscious musings over lo-fi trap-pop experiments, including one beat originally intended for Playboi Carti. On her third solo studio album, <i>PLAY ME</i>, the 72-year-old musician leans further into short, fast, rhythmic blasts of her now-inimitable blend of noise rock, trap and witch house. This time, she applies her breathy sing-speak to ruthlessly funny satire about the dregs of modern America—industrial waste, subprime mortgages, “flappers in the tech cult”. (“You wanna go to Mars?/And then what? Then what?” she scoffs on the blistering “SUBCON”.) Gordon recruits Dave Grohl to drum on “BUSY BEE”, rattles off a list of terms flagged by the second Trump administration on “BYEBYE25!” and spins the names of popular playlists into comic gold on the title track. Never before has “All the feels, chill vibes, feel free” sounded so perfectly un-chill.