Following 2024’s The Collective, the former Sonic Youth frontwoman’s fourth solo LP continues her extraordinary experimental, innovative journey, moving to more melodic beats shorter tracks, and motorik krautrock-style driven coloured by strange sounds, intense emotions and sharply angled and abstract social commentary. She turns her attention to many topical themes through her own unique musical and stylistic lens, expressing a droll, dark humour voicing modern life’s many dangerous absurdities – the collateral damage of the billionaire class: the demolition of democracy, technocratic end-times fascism, and especially the AI-fuelled homogeny and bland-deadening of culture. The title track is decorated with a slow steady beat, bass line and brass, the accompanying video from a video camera following her and anonymous shoppers around a mall: “Rich popular girl / Villain mode / Jazz in the background / Chilling after work,” Gordon delivers in a kind of sprechgesang and a list of phrases parodying Spotify playlists that exemplify frictionless culture. Dirty Tech, with its dark, trip-hop beats and Japanese video-gamestyle tune oddity, captures a dystopian, sleazy online work lifestyle and explores the power struggle between humans and robots, complemented by the Moni Haworth-directed video, which features Gordon in an abandoned corporate office: “Are you my white collar service worker? / The subplot (Yeah, yeah, yeah). / You want me, lift me up, fallеn.”
Not Today surges forward with krautrock drumming momentum, but with a hazy, woozy, dreamy guitar feedback and freewheeling, passionate vocals and abstract yet arresting lyrics. Busy Bee is an anarchic whirl of drums and distant guitar riffing, and parodies toxic addiction to money accumulation. Sub Con, No Hands, Black Out, Post Empire (Where’s my cherry pie? Makes me cry”) and more continue in this vein, creating unique, disquieting, but also mesmeric combinations of sounds that express a dizzying absurd and out-of-control world snapshot, dadaist lyrics that parody everyday phrases, tech-speak, social media, memes and more. A truly unique and brilliant artist, pushing the boundaries of song in response to a world spiralling into the unknown. Weirdly wonderful, compellingly addictive. Out on Matador Records.
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