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It’s worth pointing out that Kim Gordon, formerly of art-rock pioneers Sonic Youth, is 70 years old. Age is a less important variable than it used to be in the musical world, but with her second solo record The Collective, she’s made something so casually challenging, so effortlessly cool, it puts many provocateurs her junior to shame.
Sonic Youth existed for thirty years, and during that time, even when they were producing hit records for a major label, were exponents of gloriously overblown noise. Much has been made of this album’s hip-hop influence, and there’s definitely more of an emphasis on beats here than there was on Gordon’s solo debut No Home Record.
But her spoken delivery has always owed a debt to rap, and way back in 1990 she was singing about LL Cool J on the Sonic Youth track ‘Kool Thing’, which featured Public Enemy’s Chuck D.
Lyrics here can feel like stream of consciousness, but tracks like ‘I’m a Man’ borrow the brazenness of hip-hop for a track that’s extremely - intentionally - on the nose.
Gordon named the album The Collective after a device in Jennifer Egan’s novel The Candy House called the ‘collective consciousness’. Last year she displayed a painting in a New York gallery with the same name, which had iPhone-shaped holes punched through it.
She wanted the album to sound as dystopian as the futuristic ideas in the novel, and ideas around technology haunt the lyrics.
The album was produced by Justin Raisen, who's worked with Charli XCX, Sky Ferreira, and worked with Gordon on her solo debut. He’s responsible for the rhythms here, along with four other programmers, according to the credits.
Gordon then infused them with distortion, as cheerfully obnoxious as her old band, and the mix of precision and chaos is part of what makes this feel so exciting. There are moments throughout where a line or two of autotuned vocal appears, which feel in dialogue with current pop music, but in this context, alien and unnerving.
Befitting an album called The Collective, this is a project, not just a group of songs. Kim Gordon is an artist, and this is a thematically thought-through piece of art.
Beyond that though, it’s immediately bracing. As soon as I hit play I felt on unsteady ground, which, if you’re like me, is a fun place to be. Others will just find it unpleasant, but Gordon has been one of the coolest people on the planet for a long time now, and I doubt she cares what anyone thinks.
