In 1946, George Orwell published his essay Politics and the English Language, where he asserted the following: “Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our civilization is decadent and our language — so the argument runs — must inevitably share in the general collapse.” He associates the obfuscation of grammar with the political goal to “[defend] the indefensible.” It’s as if on purpose people began to corrupt our language, challenge our literacy skills, and flatten what was once a rich and meaningful form of communication into regurgitated nonsense in order for us simple folk to not notice their speeches regularly admit to the onslaught of war crimes they commit in other countries. In essence, the powers that be want us to whittle down our standards until there is nothing left.

Today in 2026, Kim Gordon released PLAY ME, a noise rap record that’s a babbling of out-of-context phrases and taglines over a trashy, Yuno Miles-meets-YouTube poop beat. At first glance, this is a shockingly lazy, almost offensive album to anyone with taste. (Though, for those up to date on Kim Gordon’s antics, the no wave punk days of Sonic Youth were long over, and she is on noise rap album no. 2, seemingly committed to this genre.) The lyrics throughout are bizarre and presented in short bursts of clunky, almost orgasmic yet sadistic moans set to even stinkier drum machine loop, meant to evoke the Gordon-coined “post-empire,” a technofascist reality controlled by a government that revels in isolating, disorienting, blinding, and silencing its people. Of course, it sounds mind-numbingly awful.

But Gordon, always setting herself up as a mirror for the times, shifts her language in PLAY ME to address the serious cancers of contemporary life. Her album comes at a time where tropey AI-generated pop songs can chart on Billboard and fool listeners into turning it into a TikTok trend. Where labels like HYBE can manufacture a girl group and force slop down their and our throats to make millions. Where producers and artists are encouraged to compromise their visions and write shorter, cleaner, poppier tracks for constant replay and, as you guessed it, infinite money. Gordon’s record is utterly corrupt, but it cannot exist outside an equally decaying world. It’s almost as if the artist declared that we don’t deserve good music if these are our standards for a pop hit, and this record is her version of a hunger strike. For that, PLAY ME deserves credit.

The first track “PLAY ME” yanks us by the collar into a caricature of a KATSEYE song, where every beautiful girl in that fraught dance group has been lobotomized and turned into talking dolls forced to repeat “EAT ZUCCHINI” and “BOBA TEA. GNARLY” forever. The song begins with a gentle, wonky and brassy trip beat, easing the listener into a somewhat danceable jam. Then, Gordon, in her shaky and flat vocals that sound like xanned-out Jennifer Coolidge, begins dictating playlist titles she found on Spotify: “Make out jams, turn out the lights, neon cowgirl…All the feels, chill vibes, feel free…”: in the context of the song, the words just blend into the established groove. But in true Orwellian fashion, the artist forces us to pluck them out of the jam and reckon with what they really are: meaningless words. They are purposefully alien, detaching ourselves from our bodies and its reaction to the songs we like and choose to stream.

It’d be easy to shrug off Gordon’s abrasion as music on par with the noise rappers making waves today (Nettspend, Yuno Miles, fakemink, and now apparently some guy called 2slimey), who watered down the underground and indie roots of internet rap into algorithm kitsch and never tried to advance it. Maybe it’s a good thing her longest song is three minutes and thirty-five seconds, because any second longer would become unbearable. However, this artist, as well as co-producer Justin Raisen, definitely appreciates the nuances and values of such an accessible mode of creation. “NO HANDS” attempts, at first, a clashing rap rhythm against silence and a messy electric guitar, all before the jagged drum machine and the artist’s airy and free-spirited vocals kick in. Playing like a cross between the audacious and scrappy mixing of very young Brockhampton and the easy-breezy sensuality of Addison Rae’s “Diet Pepsi”, this track has strong roots in the internet age music that inspired Gordon’s new sound. Likewise, the next song “BLACK OUT” — her most biting anti-establishment song in the record, if only for the fanged line, “Let the world burn / Feel your coin flames go higher / Stock market buy, it’s a black out / Stand by AI” — channels the vulgar, raw golden days of 2013 “Ginseng Strip 2002” Yung Lean, somehow making a jerky, outright disgusting song flow. 

Further along the record, Gordon sharpens her mind to less satirical, intentionally sedated lyrics, instead offering real spits into the faces of technocrats (“DIRTY TECH”, “SUBCON”) and right-wing politicians (“BLACK OUT”). However, there are moments where, in trying to Make A Point™, Kim Gordon comes off as completely unserious. The krautrock-y “GIRL WITH A LOOK” has Gordon, in her most whimpering yelps yet, messily begging for touch…or sex…or good music…or something…It’s honestly just filler words that don’t add anything to her narrative. Likewise, “SUBCON”, a takedown of Elon Musk that patronizes his pipe dream to go to Mars, randomly throws in a Substack name-drop, which, though that platform is responsible for a LOT of unnecessary vomiting of think-pieces and personal essays, isn’t exactly contributing to the anti-intellectual, pro-social alienation movement this specific CEO fronts. Her finale “BYEBYE25!” reworks the introduction to her 2024 noise rap record The Collection and swaps out to-do lists with Trump’s banned words of 2025. Though Gordon’s in on the joke — it’s really dumb that our government censored words like “diversity” and “care” and “they/them” — she’s not challenging our understanding of language here in the way “PLAY ME” did. “BYEBYE25!” just comes off as a simple, cheap, #NastyWoman-esque trick to piss off the president.

If any of the songs on this record proves grating to you, then congratulations: you are on the side of fighting for better standards in music. You actually like the art form, which is a quality an embarrassing number of producers and major record label heads seem to lack these days. And perhaps because you are still active in your listening habits, you don’t encounter many songs like this, even though a lot of them are taking over TikTok, Instagram, X, and YouTube (Shorts). Consider, then, Kim Gordon’s PLAY ME as a window to that harrowing world of nausea, bad lyrics, gnarly dance beats, and for-profit mentality. We can plainly see every tumor she cut out and slapped on the operating table; now, it’s time to get rid of them and cure our language.