Welcome to Kim Gordon’s Collective

In The Candy House, a 2022 novel by the writer Jennifer Egan, there is a strange, new device known as the “Collective Consciousness.” As the book itself explains it, uploading your memories to the Collective allows you to access “the anonymous thoughts and memories of everyone in the world, living or dead, who had done the same.” It’s a horrifying concept that feels futuristic but, frankly, not that far-fetched, given the looming specter of increasingly advanced AI technologies like deep fakes and ChatGPT. There would certainly be positive aspects involved, just as there are in Egan’s novel, but, likewise, such a system would come with dreadful implications.

Something about the novel, specifically the Collective Consciousness, struck Kim Gordon. “It seemed like a great idea, but also a scary idea,” she says over Zoom. “The way technology is moving so quickly, it seems like that could be in the near future almost.” The sci-fi and dystopian nature of it led the Los Angeles-bred artist to pursue something similar for her new solo record. She wanted to create something that sounded sci-fi and dystopian, and, suffice it to say, she succeeded. The Collective, Gordon’s follow-up to her excellent 2019 debut, No Home Record, is mired in icy soundscapes and lo-fi hip-hop beats that you definitely can’t study or relax to (that’s a compliment). It’s a discordant album rife with noisy textures and Gordon’s conversational vocal delivery. Imagine if “Paprika Pony,” an outlier on No Home Record in the vein of gritty SoundCloud rap, was expanded into an album’s worth of material.

For an artist who co-founded Sonic Youth, one of the most influential rock bands of the last 40 years, it’s a startling left turn. Yet Gordon unquestionably pulls it off. This doesn’t sound like a hollow pastiche; this just sounds like Kim Gordon. “I like beats, and I always have,” she explains. “I get inspired by rhythm more than melody because of my vocal ability—or lack of vocal abilities,” she jokes. In Sonic Youth, Gordon sang and played bass, and on classic songs like “Kool Thing” and “The Sprawl,” she added a cool, punk nonchalance to the band’s frenetic instrumentation. Now 70 years old and with a bevy of groundbreaking records like Daydream Nation, Goo and Dirty under her belt, she’s still cranking out incredible work that stands among her best. Most artists from storied legacy bands might get complicit and rest on their laurels, releasing milquetoast solo albums here and there to a middling reception. That couldn’t be farther from what Gordon is doing; she’s here with a bunch of soundsystem-shattering trap bangers.

She reunited with Justin Raisen, who also produced her solo debut, to reprise his role for The Collective. Raisen has worked with everyone from Charli XCX to Yves Tumor, and he has the kind of portfolio that’s perfect for an iconoclast and visionary like Gordon. One of the reasons she enjoys working with him is that he has an innate sense of what will mesh well with her style, and he pushes her as an artist. “I know that whatever I bring in, he’ll make it work, whatever weird lyrics or vocals I do,” she says. “He’d send me stuff, and I’d be like… OK… I could work on this, maybe! But I realized it’s a little bit like how I did vocals in Sonic Youth and that there were always the weird, abstract songs I got to do vocals on. It was a familiar way of working for me.” Sometimes, though, Raisen would send her beats that would momentarily stop Gordon in her tracks, but it was a welcome challenge: “When he sent the beats he worked up for ‘Trophies’ and ‘It’s Dark Inside,’ I was like, ‘Oh, my God, what am I gonna do?’ But as soon as I put guitars on it, I was like, ‘OK, let’s just make it wilder.’” On “Trophies” and “It’s Dark Inside” in particular, Gordon starts improvising her lyrics halfway through each song, and, as she describes it, she “went into some kind of weird headspace.”

It’s easy to enter a dreamlike state when you’re listening to The Collective, trying to absorb its countless details and variegated atmosphere. It’s a deeply visceral record, and it’s that vividness that draws her toward music as a form of artistic expression. “I like performing, and I like moving around in space,” Gordon says. Making art can be a solitary craft, but sharing it with others turns into a communal one. That’s what compels her to pursue certain artistic media: performing. Even then, there’s some overlap between her music and visual art. She likens sequencing a record to putting together an art installation, where the order in which you’re hearing the songs or viewing the paintings is vital to the holistic experience. “Not everyone does this; some people just make paintings and put them up on a wall,” Gordon says. “But normally there is thought about how it is installed, and it makes the work look better in a certain way. It makes it feel like a whole show.”

What unites all of Kim Gordon’s artistic pursuits, though, is her potent conceptual framework. It’s how both her visual art and music are in conversation with each other, and it’s how she approaches all of her work, regardless of its format. Album opener “BYE BYE,” for example, is a lengthy shopping list delivered over blown-out 808s and atonal, distorted guitar: “Hoodie, toothpaste / Brush, foundation,” Gordon deadpans in the second verse. She mentions this song specifically as an illustration of her unorthodox songwriting process. “I’m not really approaching music in a conventional way, like verse-chorus-verse-chorus,” she explains. “I’m not really thinking about music things.” The lyrics to “BYE BYE,” as well as plenty of others on the album, resemble pop-art more than they do a typical song couplet. In the album credits, Gordon thanks novelist and essayist Rachel Kushner for lyrical prompts. “I needed a song idea, and she was like, ‘What about bowling trophies,’” she laughs. “I’m always collecting phrases, and she gave me a couple of phrases.” One of those is “It’s good enough for Nancy [Reagan],” referring to the former First Lady of the United States, in “I’m a Man.”

Taken as a whole, The Collective is an album about escapism and the many forms it can take. Late-album highlight “The Believers” is, in Gordon’s own words, a “fantasy about falling asleep in the country and waking up in the middle of a commercial for, like, Kanye sunglasses.” There’s “Psychedelic Orgasm,” which is about a “passive-aggressive strike” where no one does anything except take magic mushrooms. Although each of its 11 tracks explores a different facet of it, The Collective is an escape from our dire societal straits. “I’m just reacting to how crazy the world is right now,” Gordon explains. No matter how irreparably shitty everything is, even if we’re all uploading our memories to the Collective Consciousness for others to peruse like they’re items at a convenience store, at least one thing is for certain: Kim Gordon will always be making fantastic music to lose yourself in.

Grant Sharples is a writer, journalist and critic in Kansas City. He writes the Best New Indie column at UPROXX. His work has also appeared in Pitchfork, Stereogum, The Ringer, Los Angeles Review of Books and other publications.