On her latest single, Kim Gordon doesn’t rage against the machine. She interrogates it.
‘DIRTY TECH’, the second single from her forthcoming third solo album PLAY ME, due March 13 via Matador Records, feels less like a song and more like a transmission from a future already unfolding. Built on grinding textures and clipped urgency, the track dissects the power struggle between humans and the algorithms poised to replace them. It’s not dystopian theatre. It’s corporate realism.
The Moni Haworth-directed video places Gordon inside an abandoned corporate office, fluorescent-lit and emotionally airless, as if the human workforce has already been quietly removed. “I was kind of musing about, is my next boss going to be an AI chatbot?” Gordon says. “We’re the first ones whose lights are going to go out—not the tech billionaires. It’s so abstract that people can’t comprehend.” In Gordon’s hands, abstraction becomes a scalpel. She names the anxiety by circling it.
The single follows last month’s lead track ‘NOT TODAY’, accompanied by a short film directed by Rodarte founders Kate and Laura Mulleavy alongside cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt. If that release hinted at PLAY ME’s emotional architecture, ‘DIRTY TECH’ expands it outward, situating Gordon’s internal reckoning within a broader cultural collapse.
Across the album, Gordon processes what she frames as the collateral damage of the billionaire class: democratic erosion, technocratic end-times logic, and the A.I.-driven flattening of culture into ambient noise. Yet for all its outward gaze, PLAY ME remains interior. The jams are physical, restless, charged with dark humour that refuses easy slogans. Gordon doesn’t offer answers. She offers friction.
With UK and European headline and festival dates announced for spring and more to follow, Gordon once again positions herself not as elder stateswoman but as active participant in the present tense. The machine hums louder. She hums back.
KIM GORDON TOUR DATES:
April 12 – Variations Festival, Nantes, France
April 14 – O2 Shepherds Bush Empire, London, UK
April 15 – Ancient Belgique, Bruxelles, Belgium
April 17 – Le Trianon, Paris, France
April 19 – Huxley’s Neue Welt, Berlin, Germany
April 20 – A2, Wroclaw, Poland
April 21 – Progesja, Warsaw, Poland
