Kim Gordon Announces First Solo Album
Kim Gordon announces No Home Record, her first-ever solo album that will be released Friday 11 October via Matador Records / Remote Control Records. An expert operation in the uncanny, No Home Record is a seismic, watershed moment in the singular career of one of the most trailblazing music, art and fashion icons of our time.
The announcement is accompanied by a striking Loretta Fahrenholz – directed video for new song Sketch Artist, where Gordon sings about “dreaming in a tent” as the music shutters and skips like scenery through a car window. Speaking on the video, Fahrenholz says: “Sketch Artist is a haunted car ride. Kim drives as “Unter” Pool summons passengers throughout nighttime LA. The city drifts by, passengers intermingle in the back seat and Kim’s deadly stare shocks pedestrians along her route.” Cameos include actress and writer Abbi Jacobson and Gordon’s own Cavalier King Charles Spaniel .
Among its nine tracks, No Home Record also features 2016 single Murdered Out, which is available with Sketch Artist now across digital services.
Produced by Justin Raisen (Angel Olsen, Yves Tumor, John Cale, Charli XCX, etc.), recorded at Sphere Ranch in Los Angeles, and borrowing its name from a Chantal Akerman film, No Home Record is, in many ways, a return as much as it is a departure. When Gordon first began playing music in the early 1980s, she used a guitar, a drum machine, and some lyrics sniped from magazine advertisement copy. No Home Record contains echoes of that setup, in both form and concept. On Cookie Butter (produced by Shawn Everett), Gordon’s vocals jut out insistently over a tinny raindrop beat: “You fucked / You think / I want / You fell.” The song continues, hectic and driving, until finding resolution in the lines “Industrial metal supplies / Cookie butter,” perfectly illustrating Gordon’s singular lyric capacity to meld cultural critique, divulgence and humour.
This captivating ability is further exemplified by Don’t Play it Back (Produceed by Jake Meginsky) where Gordon’s wry vocals slice the track’s circling electric floor: “You don’t own me / Golden Vanity / You can pee in the ocean / It’s Free.” This nod – with a wink – towards culture’ increasingly fraught (and increasingly commodified) relationship with identity and the self us one of the No Home Record’s central themes.
“Shopping off a cliff / You’re a breath on my eye / To lose a compass of teeth / Hash away at twitter,” Gordon recites, phosphorescent and dirge-like, on the album’s stunning closer Get Your Life Back, “Everyday, everyday, everyday / I feel bad for you / I feel bad for me.”
It makes sense that this American idea (as Gordon says on the agitated rock track ‘Air BnB’) of purchasing utopia permeates the record, as no place is this phenomenon more apparent than Los Angeles, where Gordon was born and recently returned to after several lifetimes on the east coast. It was a move precipitated by a number of seismic shifts in her personal life and undoubtedly plays a role in No Home Record’s fascination with transience. Earthquake, perhaps the record’s most straightforward track embodies this mood; Gordon’s voice wavering like watercolour: “If I could cry and shake for you / I’d lay awake for you / I got sand in my heart for you,” guitar strokes blending into one another as they bleed out across an unstable page.
With a career spanning nearly four decades, Kim Gordon is one of the most prolific and visionary artists working today. A co-founder of the legendary Sonic Youth, Gordon has performed all over the world, collaborating with many of music’s most exciting figures including Tony Conrad, Ikue Mori, Julie Cafritz and Stephen Malkmus. Most recently, Gordon has been hitting the road with Body/Head, her spellbinding partnership with artist and musician Bill Nace. Despite the exhaustive nature of her résumé, the most reliable aspect of Gordon’s music may be its resistance to formula. Songs discover themselves as they unspool, each one performing a test of the medium’s possibilities and limits. Her command is astonishing, but Gordon’s artistic curiosity remains the guiding force behind her music.
Kim Gordon – No Home Record
- Sketch Artist
- Air Bnb
- Paprika Pony
- Murdered Out
- Don’t Play It
- Cookie Butter
- Hungry Baby
- Earthquake
- Get Yr Life Back
Pre-order No Home Record
