The Age of Kim Gordon

The enduring iconoclast on living and creating on her own terms.

By Khagan Aslanov

Published on March 10, 2026

Kim Gordon has never belonged neatly to any era — even the ones she helped define. When the ’90s underground hardened into mythology, she slipped past it. When noise rock calcified into canon, she veered toward abstraction. Decades into a career that reshaped the boundaries between art, fashion, feminism and sound, Gordon remains less interested in legacy than in forward motion. That tension between past and present feels especially vivid now.

Connecting with RANGE on the heels of her new album, Play Me, Gordon has just returned from the Sundance premiere of The Best Summer, Tamra Davis’ documentary assembled from forgotten VHS tapes discovered as Davis and her family evacuated during the Palisades fires. The film captures the ’90s underground as it bled into the mainstream — the fashion, the friction, and bands like Beastie Boys and Bikini Kill at their height.

“It was fun to see it all on the big screen. Everyone looks so young. Coco was just a baby then, she was there. Tamra just found all these tapes, and the footage looks amazing. My only advice was not to do any voice-overs or do any current interviews for it. Because it just takes you out of this great slice of the ’90s, away from these bands captured at a certain time,” Gordon reflects.

Nostalgia, however, has never been her default setting. Over the past 15 years, she has pushed her multi-media practice forward, rarely dwelling on one of the most enduring and conflicted noise rock legacies of the last half-century. The past exists — it simply doesn’t anchor her.

Then again, for Gordon, her sharp veer into music was always happenstance: “In a way, I feel more like an interventionist in music. I still feel that I’m a visual artist who makes music. Or maybe a sociologist. Or a bad poet,” she laughs. “But I do feel that nowadays, my art and music are coming together a little more.”

For all the speculation that surrounds her past ventures, Gordon seems possessed with an irrepressible desire to move forward, in no way preoccupied with attached martyrdom.

She’s also found an abiding collaborator in Justin Raisen, an L.A.-based producer who brings an experimental slant to pop songwriting. Their bond is deeply felt throughout Play Me, which takes shape as a continuation of 2024’s The Collective. Short and focused, with both feet planted at the outer perimeter of the mainstream, it’s another scintillating display of cavernous mutant pop, where noise functions as an enhancing substrate rather than the primary motive power.

“Justin knows what I like, something that emphasizes space. He’ll send me beats, and I’ll loosely write some lyrics. If there are any melodic guitar parts, it’s Justin playing them. And I don’t play any bass on the record either. I do improvised textural guitar and noise, and then I’ll do vocals. And the vocals are sometimes also improvised,” Gordon explains.

Making music with a synthetic core invites consideration of AI’s increasingly usurping role in the arts. Here, Gordon relishes that experimental music offers something of a safe haven — its individual voices and sounds not so easily replicated or synthesized.

It’s a potent thought from an artist who has spent decades speaking to the dread of surveillance and the sensation of being watched. The detachment a consumer might feel as music slides into background distraction weighs heavily on someone who grew up building mixtapes and actively seeking communion with favourite records:

“People listen to music, but they don’t know who the artists are, or they’re not really listening. It’s something happening in the background that makes them feel good. And the way music is produced today is kind of like wallpaper,” she muses.

Another aspect of modern life that rears its head is what the world looks like now for a woman. Gordon grew up during the second wave of feminism and stood at the forefront of its third. Living now, with rights she fought for being peeled back, is not pleasant to witness.

“It’s kind of a shit show,” she says. “I just read this article about American Psycho, and how Brett Easton Ellis wrote that character as dark satire, but a lot of tech and Wall Street men have taken it as a role model. And it coincided with this obsession with men seeking, having an identity crisis and overcompensating by being ultra-masculine.”

Both the grisly and the rapturous remain crucial pillars in shaping Gordon — an artist with little to prove, yet one who carries on with her vision.

All in all, this feels like a particularly precious period in her career — a radical untethering from perceptions of age, gender or the past, and a time of creative freedom. Even setting aside how mesmerizing and self-assured Play Me is, that acute sense of liberty alone makes Kim Gordon’s present pursuit about as pure as art can get.