Kim Gordon's latest album takes aim at AI and American technocracy

When I came of age in the late 2000s, the world was caught in the grips of a techno-utopian fever dream. The internet was going to usher us into a brave new future, one of full data transparency, empowered citizens and flattened hierarchies. Social media was going to lead to a new wave of democratisation, as old autocratic regimes crumbled under the assault of citizen journalism and digitally-networked activists. Tech firm CEOs were treated as rockstars—disruptors, innovators, cyber-prophets of the upcoming digital Golden Era.

Twenty years later, that dream has curdled into a dystopian nightmare. The digital economy turned out to be the ultimate panopticon, trapping us in a spider-web of pervasive surveillance. The information highway has become a gridlock traffic jam of misinformation, propaganda and algorithmic manipulation. And that’s before you get into AI, with its destructive effects on our natural resources, the job market and human creativity.

My personal barometer of this sea change is the technology sub on reddit, the extremely online millennial’s social media of choice. Once a hub of techno-optimism, where users would discuss the latest tech products and firms with barely restrained excitement, it now has all the warmth and good cheer of a Narcotics Anonymous meeting. It seethes with rage—at fascist-friendly tech-bros, at the creeping march of AI, at the sheer evilness of firms that once pompously encouraged us to not “be evil.”

Listening to Play Me, the latest album by 72-year-old American musician, actor, artist and indie icon Kim Gordon, I wonder if she’s been reading r/technology lately. The record is savage in its evisceration of American technocracy—its shallow consumerism, its devaluation of humanity, its irredeemable stupidity. Over 12 short, sharp tracks, Gordon takes aim at surveillance capitalism, tech cults and the Donald Trump administration’s war on DEI. Most of all, she pokes fun at just how many of the leading lights of contemporary tech are such total losers (“You wanna go to Mars and then what? Then what? Then what?” she sneers on Subcon, taunting Elon Musk).

That last indictment hits doubly hard when it comes from an artist who has been the epitome of cool for the last four decades. An art-school grad who picked up the guitar at 28 after being inspired by the late 70s New York No Wave scene, Gordon is one of the most revered figures in alternative culture. Sonic Youth, the band she co-founded with her boyfriend and soon-to-be husband Thurston Moore in 1981, is perhaps the most influential band since the Velvet Underground—torchbearers of the noise-rock scene, muses and mentors to everyone from Kurt Cobain and Dinosaur Jr to Mogwai, Ride and Napalm Death.

When the band—and the marriage—broke up in 2011, after 30 years together, Gordon responded by exploring new, more experimental creative territory. She threw herself into creating art, showing her work at galleries in London and New York. Her music became even more avant-garde, first under the Body/Head noise-rock project with Bill Nace and then as a solo artist.

Working with Justin Raisen—a record producer whose credits include Lil Yachty, Kid Cudi and Nicki Minaj—she added hip-hop, trap and rage-rap to her palette of sounds. Her previous album, 2024’s The Collective set diaristic, stream-of-consciousness lyrics about performative masculinity and consumerist culture over dense industrial beats and freewheeling hyper-distorted guitars. Play Me leans even further into trap and hip-hop rhythms, as Gordon strips away some of her trademark lyrical abstraction to make her critiques more pointed and explicit.

Over the opening title track’s boom-bap shuffle and jazz-rap horns, she drawls out a list of Spotify-generated playlists (“Easy Rider, '70s hippie, Spring pop, Chill vibes”), taking digs at the streaming platform’s ambition to become a mood machine, turning the complexity of human emotional states into a mix-and-match catalog of AI-assisted metadata and personality type tests. The nu-metal guitars and skittering trap 808s of Black Out soundtrack caustic takedowns of the AI bubble (“Stock market buy, it's a black out/ Stand by AI, AI, AI”) and the environmental cost of our addiction to cheap tech (“Let's pretend thеre's an epilogue/ Let the world burn”).

On Dirty Tech, she imagines what it would be like to have an AI as a boss, a lover or a friend (“Are you my white collar service worker?”), while the dissonant, paranoid Nail Biter captures the futility of trying to fill the hole of late-capitalist existentialism with cheap consumer goods and plastic surgery ‘self-improvement’.

The album’s high water mark is its mid-section, particularly Not Today and Busy Bee. The former is a shoegaze-y throwback to the early Sonic Youth years, with its dreamy, swirling guitars and impressionistic lyrics delivered in Gordon’s signature sprechstimme. The latter is something much gnarlier and avant-garde, featuring bit-crunched guitars, chopped up industrial drums, and a sped-up sample from an old MTV interview with Gordon and her Free Kitten bandmate Julia Cafritz. “Busy bee taking money,” Gordon sings in a trembling, Arabic-modality falsetto, after declaring emphatically that “God, he ain’t here.”

Play Me ends with BYEBYE25!, a reworking of a track from The Collective. While the original read like a to-do list/shopping list encapsulating the mundane absurdity of contemporary life, this one is more of a political manifesto, with the lyrics almost entirely consisting of words or phrases that the Trump admin has banned from official websites and documents—“mental health, transgender, peanut allergy, abortion.” It’s a stark reminder of what we’ve already lost in this new era of techno-fascism. And what’s still at stake if we don’t fight back—creativity, critical thinking, our very sense of humanity. Gordon may be 72, but she’s still up for the fight. Are you?