There are few things more surreal than hearing Kim Gordon talk about Fleetwood Mac. Not just that she likes them, but that Tusk was the gateway record. “It’s weird. I hear Fleetwood Mac all over now—like, you can’t escape it,” she says, sounding as surprised as the rest of us. But when Kim Gordon drops a reference, it’s rarely by accident. Her new solo album, No Home Record, is a twisted echo of pop music: full of brutalist beats, ASMR menace, and half-sung mantras about Airbnb art and performative culture.
“I don’t sit down and put on a noise record at home,” Gordon admits, gently demolishing the imagined purity of her experimental roots. “It’s more something I’d go see as an experience.” But this record? This record’s got songs.
After years with Body/Head—a duo with Bill Nace dedicated to improvisation and controlled chaos—Gordon’s first proper solo album lands with a smirk and a stomp. “It was kind of an experiment,” she says. “I don’t listen to that much pop music… but I like rap, and I like songs.”
If No Home Record scans as some kind of satirical deconstruction of pop structure, well, that’s not an accident. Gordon’s always been more sociologist than rock star. “There is a lot of art that is basically decoration,” she says, deriding the Pinterestification of visual culture. “Once you see it in a corporate lobby… it just looks like decoration to me. Then it matches the bedspread and the towels.”
This isn’t some mid-career pivot into cranky critique—she’s been saying stuff like this since the Reagan era. It’s just that now the world has caught up to her. Songs like “Paprika Pony” throb with old-school hip-hop minimalism, which Gordon connects to her time in early-80s NYC, a place where Rick Rubin was just a kid recording in his dorm. “He told me he was going to record rap artists in his dorm room and I was like, yeah right, Rick,” she laughs.
That affinity with hip-hop runs deep, but for Gordon, it’s more than just sonic. “I’m not a best singer. I’m more a rhythm kind of person,” she explains. “I relate to hip-hop because it’s punk. You don’t have to know much about music. You just do it.”
If her music is still punk, it’s punk in its least fashionable form: weary, skeptical, and uninterested in nostalgia. Asked if she’ll be playing any of her old Sonic Youth songs on the upcoming tour, she doesn’t hesitate: “No. I can’t really think of any I’d be able to pull off unless I just did it a cappella.”
Instead, she hints at a performance that will lean toward the weird and the conceptual: backing tracks, live players, maybe something closer to an “art performance.” You’re not getting “Bull in the Heather” unless it’s via interpretive dance.
That refusal to live in the past didn’t stop us from asking her to talk about it. Her reflections on A Thousand Leaves and Daydream Nation are surprising in their casual distance. “People would say, your records don’t sound like you do live,” she recalls. “After a while we just gave up trying.” Still, she admits that Daydream Nation was a beast to perform. “It was intense to play. The songs were so dense.”
As for A Thousand Leaves, she calls it naturalistic and points to its timing—the band had just built their own studio, finally free from major label scheduling purgatory. “You have to wait so long to put a record out,” she says, like someone who’s waited too long.
And while Gordon isn’t interested in giving Girl in a Band: The Sequel, she knows fans are drawing connections between her lyrics then and now. “I don’t really feel like [the lyrics] have to update the book,” she says, somewhat amused. “I guess if you’re a fan, you’re gonna try to draw the connections.”
She’s also skeptical about the idea of any real systemic change. We brought up the current cultural reckoning, the way her old lyrics now feel like rallying cries in the #MeToo era. She’s not buying the narrative. “Sexism didn’t just happen,” she says. “It’s genetically ingrained. It’s deep. I just hope it keeps moving forward.”
She’s still hopeful enough to keep working—on art, on records, on improvised noise. But don’t ask her to spell it all out for you. “People always want a narrative,” she says. “Sometimes I just like to play music.”
And sometimes, apparently, she just likes Tusk.
And an earlier interview with Kim.
