By Steve Erickson

The album’s layers of thick and swampy sound make Kim Gordon’s anxious point.

Kim Gordon, The Collective (Matador Records)

If The Collective were a sculpture, it would be an enormous tower of metal wreathed in clouds of dark, suffocating smoke. The album’s sound design is computerized: voice and guitar are destabilized, which stretches them out into canyons of echo. Still, the music retains strong touches of humanity. The Collective pushes the boundaries of rock music much like Low’s 2018 Double Negative. Even though Gordon still plays guitar, her songs are created from loops, using drum programming (with a startlingly aggressive range of timbres) and samples. Most of the tracks begin with a drum machine. Gordon sings with a blasé tone that conceals evident jitters.

For more than 30 years, Gordon played bass and guitar with Sonic Youth. She sang many of the band’s best songs: the Stooges cover “I Wanna Be Your Dog,” “Pacific Coast Highway,” “The Sprawl,” “Star Power,” and “Shadow of a Doubt.” After the band broke up in 2012, she’s been its most forward-thinking member, starting over as half of the improvised guitar duo Body/Head. Creatively, she is far from churning out the lazy legacy product of your typical 70 year-old rocker. Even as Gordon looks back at the music of the early days of Sonic Youth – old-school hip-hop, No Wave, industrial – she approaches it now through the prism of artists that were influenced by it. She makes noise informed by SOPHIE, JPEGMAFIA, and Death Grips’ innovations.

“Bye Bye” announces the arrival of The Collective via a playful banality. Over rattling 808s and one-note bells, Gordon recites a list of items to pack for a trip: “Advil, black jeans, blue jeans/Cardigan, purse, passport/Pajamas, silk.” On one level, the lyrics could be taken directly from instructions set beside a suitcase. But, on the other, they set out Gordon’s journey from under the umbrella of Sonic Youth and her marriage to its guitarist Thurston Moore. The song’s simple declaration — “bye bye.” Pitchfork critic Alphonse Pierre linked the track to the rage sub-genre formed around rapper Playboi Carti’s Opium label.

Enormous humor is generated in the contrast between Gordon’s blasé spoken vocals and the building intensity of the music. The guitar turns into barely recognizable noise once Gordon stops singing.

Sonic Youth had an appreciative but ironic relationship to pop and hip-hop. Their cover of Robert Palmer’s “Addicted to Love” placed Gordon’s vocals over a karaoke backing track. The music video made the sarcasm clearer; Gordon was posed in front of images of soldiers. This was the audio version of Patrick Bateman’s American Psycho rants about Huey Lewis, Phil Collins, and Whitney Houston. In the days before poptimism, a rock band was forced to turn their fascination with Madonna into a joke. (They dropped an album of goofy throwaways under the moniker of Ciccone Youth.) In the early ‘90s, Sonic Youth toured with Public Enemy, but Chuck D.’s guest appearance on “Kool Thing” was less impressive than a full collaboration at both groups’ peak would have been. Sonic Youth’s lesser-known team-up with Cypress Hill, “I Love You, Mary Jane,” was a more appealing bridge between rock and hip-hop.

Kim Gordon — she is far from churning out the lazy legacy product of your typical 70 year-old rocker. Photo: courtesy of the artist

The Collective takes a far different dissident attitude. It accepts the digital processing of current pop music as a given. (Gordon occasionally sings through Autotune.) Producer Justin Raisen, who contributed most of the album’s drum programming, samples, and keyboards, takes the place of Body/Head’s Bill Nace as Gordon’s creative partner.  He originally intended to submit the beat for “Bye Bye” to Playboi Carti, The Ensoniq ASR-10 sampler/synthesizer is cited by name in the liner notes; its capacity to layer filter on filter on filter is omnipresent. Rather than replicating a band playing live instruments, tracks are structured out of impossibly extended pieces of guitar and vocals. “Trophies” sustains tiny bits of noise that deaden into endless decay. Drones last till they suddenly collapse. “I Don’t Miss My Mind” distorts 808s into a brutal fuzz. The title track’s percussion sputters like a sound loop of a car that is on its last legs.

Psychologically, The Collective speaks out from a frightened space. With Sonic Youth, Gordon sometimes sang from the perspective of a violent man. “I’m a Man” returns to this interest, in this case from the perspective of an incel: “dropped out of college/don’t have a degree/and I can’t get a date/it’s not my fault.” The second verse reveals the guy’s repressed femme — even trans — impulses. Alex Ross Perry’s music video carries this vision even further. Shot in the style of a ‘60s exploitation movie, the visuals point to cinema’s reinforcement of traditional gender roles — as well as its potential to subvert them. After a flickering montage of cowboys, a man peeps through a hole in the wall at a woman, played by Gordon’s daughter, Coco Gordon-Moore, rummaging through her clothes. But, as creepy as this scenario appears to be, it turns into an exchange, as he enters her room to try on her skirt and she dons the fringed jacket he leaves behind.

The album’s music is dense and thorny enough to capture the convoluted psyche of the complex people in the video, but Gordon’s lyrics — aside from sardonic phrases like “cement the brand” — are  submerged in layers of thick and swampy sound.  Making its points in other ways, The Collective‘s dense maximalism reflects the anxieties ensnared in Gordon’s mind.

Steve Erickson writes about film and music for Gay City News, Slant Magazine, the Nashville Scene, Trouser Press, and other outlets. He also produces electronic music under the tag callinamagician. His latest album, Bells and Whistles, was released in January 2024, and is available to stream here.