Kim Gordon, photo by Moni Howarth

Every Friday, Relix surveys the wealth of new music released over the past seven days and selects dozens of standouts for the Relix Staff Picks playlist. Read on for the highlights from this week’s batch.

Kim Gordon is reading the room. Behind her steeled visage, her eyes flash at unshakable sights, appalled and engrossed. She’s seen the car crash in slow motion, and on Play Me, she reads back the malfunctions behind the smoldering wreckage, lifted directly from life’s surface level and speaking to deeper disturbances.

Gordon’s follow-up to 2024’s The Collective expands on that Grammy-nominated project and all the disruption she’s carved out with producer Justin Raisen, pushing her massive, grinding, trap and rage-refracting sound past its limits and filling in the fissures with bits of synth-pop, krautrock and other indistinguishable noise. Through alternately leaden, blown-up cold fronts and skittering, caustically vibrant loops, she falls into willing lockstep with the calculated and inane tone of the times; on the title track and “BYEBYE25!,” she rattles off Spotify playlist names, like “Make Out Jams” and “Feel Free,” with the same leashed intensity as terms targeted by Trump’s culture war, like “gay,” “victim,” “women,” and “care.”

The former Sonic Youth vocalist, guitarist and bassist’s latest solo album is unsentimental and forward-looking as ever, but stands apart in its emotionality. Gordon summons all her fury and yearning into both the adently melodic singing of “NOT TODAY” and the numb recitation elsewhere that cuts away language’s pretense to unmask cultural codes. Three albums in with alt-pop hitmaker Raisen behind the boards, the collaborators used their foundation of understanding to capture immediacy: The 12-track set is instinctive, reactive and vivid, overloading its mechanistic song structures with breakthrough conviction.

“We wanted the songs to be short,” Gordon detailed. “We wanted to do it really fast. It’s more focused, and maybe more confident. I always kind of work off of rhythms, and I knew I wanted it to be even more beat-oriented than the last one. Justin really gets my voice and my lyrics and he understands how I work—that came forth even more on this record.”

The latest batch of Relix Staff Picks also includes new music from The Orielles, Cut Worms, Tinariwen, Bill Orcutt, Ora Cogan, The Black Crowes, Wendy Eisenberg, Thundercat, Kevin Morby, Annahstasia, Operelly, Cat Clyde and many more gems. Tune in here.