Listening to the first two thirds of Sonic Youth's Daydream Nation (the last third lopped off so it'd fit on one side of 90-minute TDK tape) back in 1989, there was no way of imagining that, in three decades, Kim Gordon might become a SoundCloud rapper. Yet, branching histories and unknowable futures aside, it's clear that lines like "Let's go walkin' on water / You think I'm Satan's daughter / I wanna know / Please let me go" from that album's "Cross the Breeze" are definitely a traceable echo in the lyrics ("Let go / Let's go / No hands on the wheel") of "NO HANDS" from her third solo album PLAY ME — just over a trap beat instead of noisy surging guitar. Plus ça change, as they say. Pre-millennium Gordon was an uppercase-A artist who gradually settled into the '80s New York noise rock scene and learned to play an instrument at age 27 to co-found Sonic Youth. She provided fashion-forward imagery plus a savvy, if mildly surreal, brand of gender politics. This helped define the band's underlying punk aesthetic, plus its street-level politics and poetics, which she continued to develop and wrap around more complex shapes as time progressed. Since the dissolution of Sonic Youth in 2011, Gordon has explored her more avant-garde tendencies in a variety of projects, most notably the duo she formed with Bill Nace called Body/Head. Her solo career proper launched in 2019 with the release of No Home Record, where her collaboration with producer/engineer Justin Raisen also began. Raisen's work can be found on albums by everyone from Kylie Minogue to Charli xcx to HEALTH, and it's perhaps his ability to delineate where pop and noise properly meet that drew him and Gordon together. The follow-up to 2024's The Collective, PLAY ME is a concentrated distillation of Gordon's contemporary electroclash, with songs that start with a punch and end in under three minutes, doors left swinging open in the aftershock. Gordon has admitted in interviews that the album was decidedly shaped by her exposure to the news. While this wasn't something that had previously been a touchpoint, in an era where the cultural fabric is continually torn apart by robber barons, her desire to kick back is expressed with impressionistic portrayals of our seduction by — and entrapment within — late-stage capitalism on tracks like "DIRTY TECH" and "POST EMPIRE." The heady nature of this stance is delivered within the ironic modernity of the Raisen's digital gloss. The key to PLAY ME being more than just an icon surfing musical trends back toward the shore of relevance is how the album is built outward from Kim Gordon's abiding persona, rather than just plugging her into something already booted up and ready to try on. For example, musically, "BUSY BEE" — which features drumming from Dave Grohl — may sound like a corrupted file from a clipping. bootleg, but it kicks off with a soundbite from a '90s Free Kitten interview with Gordon and then-bandmate Julia Cafritz before descending into a lo-fi dance workout reminiscent of Sonic Youth's Madonna-curious side project Ciccone Youth. The album's blipping between hip-hop, footwork and a clutch of other electronic styles does carry a prêt-à-porter element, but one that hangs well on Gordon's frame with every new fit. Dancing while the world burns is a concept that has unfortunately required fresh artistic investigation since Roman times. With Trump, Musk, Bezos et al. filling the Nero slot, it's up to Gordon and others like her — though few truly are — to point their own propaganda back at them. Sometimes resistance is a rhythmic thing.