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“You’re Kim fucking Gordon!” yelled an audience member into a gap between songs. She did not acknowledge it. She barely blinked. The band rolled into the next track and the moment passed, which was somehow the most Kim Gordon response available.
This year’s PLAY ME, Gordon’s third solo album and her second straight collaboration with producer Justin Raisen, is short and fast by design, twelve tracks in under half an hour, trap beats and industrial grime shoved up against a krautrock pulse. It is compressed and menacing on record. I had gone in with a question of translation. How that would open up live, in a room as intimate as the Hollywood, was the draw. Oh, and also just being in the same space as alt-rock and no wave royalty Kim fucking Gordon.
At 73 years young, the Sonic Youth co-founder is making the most forward-looking music of her solo run, and on Monday night she played it like someone with nothing left to prove and no interest in proving it anyway.
SASAMI opened. The Los Angeles musician, born Sasami Ashworth and classically trained on French horn before her years with Cherry Glazerr, now moves between heavy and soft with a restlessness that mostly works. Her poppier material, drawn from last year’s Blood on the Silver Screen, did not fully grab me. A few of the gentler songs drifted into a Sheryl Crow easiness that felt out of step with the night. But when she reached for heavy distorted guitar and punishing drums, I was all the way in. Her best moment was her last. She closed with “Squeeze,” telling the crowd it was influenced by Kim Gordon herself. Opening for your hero and attempting to sound like her is a bold move, but it worked.
Then came Gordon in a black sequin dress and visible panties. She front-loaded the entire new record, moving through PLAY ME almost in album sequence: the title track, then “Girl With a Look,” and by the third song, “No Hands,” the set had pulled into a groove and simply stayed there. The low end did the heavy lifting all night, thick and physical, with Gordon’s flat, talk-sung delivery riding on top of it rather than fighting it. The excellent “Not Today” stood out as a rare moment of her actually singing. Other highlights included “Black Out,” and “Busy Bee”, and as the set ran through the new album through to “Nail Biter,” the songs blurred into one propulsive block, which is more or less how the album works too.
What made it more than a sound bath was the staging of Gordon herself. She performed with a deadpan seriousness that bordered on cold, fashion-forward, and provocative in a way that would read as a stunt on almost anyone else and simply reads as cool on her. Behind her, a young band was clearly having the time of its life, all grins and energy, which contrasted with her icy composure. She knows exactly what she is doing, and she has known for forty years.
The back half opened up the catalogue. “Bye Bye,” from 2024’s The Collective, arrived alongside “Trophies, “It’s Dark Inside”, and “Psychedelic Orgasm”, the run that ties the new beat-driven direction back to the record that started it. A few of the tracks incorporated the sound of a screwdriver sliding across guitar. Gordon reached further back for “Paprika Pony” and “Cookie Butter” from her 2019 debut No Home Record before leaving the stage.
An encore was a surprise. The unreleased “Cigarette” arrived as a dry, smoky come-on, but the guitar underneath it went somewhere the rest of the night had not. The scrape and tension and unresolved noise pulled straight back to mid-80s Sonic Youth, the EVOL and Sister years, when the band was still sharpening dissonance into something that could carry a song. After an hour of programmed low end, hearing that vocabulary return was a genuine jolt, and a reminder of exactly whose blueprint half the acts on this year’s bills are working from.
There is a temptation, writing about an artist of Gordon’s stature and age, to grade on a curve. None of that applied. This was not a legacy act on a victory lap. It was the sharpest, most current material of her solo career, delivered by someone still several steps ahead of musicians a third her age. The guy in the crowd had it right, even if she never gave him the satisfaction. What a pro. What a queen.
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