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Mar 7, 2024This is an astonishing album.
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Mar 6, 2024The album succeeds wholly on its immediacy, and both its soundscapes and directionless lyrics slap you in the face with its message. It’s impossible to listen to The Collective without knowing exactly what Kim Gordon is talking about.
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Mar 7, 2024The cacophonous, vexing, endlessly fascinating The Collective represents the experience of logging off and finding that your perception of the real world has been forever altered. Few are better equipped than Gordon—who, at 70, is still cooler, smarter, and more fearless than most—to guide us through.
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Classic Rock MagazineApr 26, 2024It's a very New York record, It's an energetic record, and while the older listener would enjoy some guitar playing frm Gordon - that sort of thing seems to be supplied by Raisen and engineer Anthony Paul Lopez - it's her attitude. not the glitchy beats, that really give The Collective its aggression and fun. [Jun 2024, p.74]
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Apr 3, 2024The Collective is hard to pin down, but that is part of what makes it so compelling.
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Mar 8, 2024Though she's never been a hesitant or unfocused artist, listening to Gordon come into her own on The Collective is a wonder, especially because she's not remaking herself to stay relevant -- it's the rest of the music and pop culture world finally catching up to her.
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Mar 7, 2024Her goal on The Collective, as was her goal with Sonic Youth, is to subvert listeners’ expectations. Gordon will turn 71 next month, and she’s made one of the most daring albums of her career. If you want to get it though, you have to turn it up and submit.
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Mar 7, 2024Gordon has managed to create an album that pushes her legacy as an experimental force even further, another piece in a discography that refuses to be categorized. Rather than drift off quietly into the sunset, she might just be making the most interesting music of her career.
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Mar 7, 2024Not all of these experiments quite come off: the industrial clang of ‘It’s Dark Inside’, on which she drawls, “they don’t teach clit in school / Like do Lit”, veers close to ‘Yeezus’ parody. It’s notable, though, how contemporary her distorted art-punk sounds.
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Mar 7, 2024Her eye for her own artistic point of view has never been sharper. The rest of the record is an equally thrilling ride.
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Mar 6, 2024By the album’s end - thanks, in part, to the droning noise and scuffed beats on closer ‘Dream Dollar’ - there’s a definite sense of the walls closing in. Here the distance Kim Gordon has forged, both across the album and throughout her career, is falling away - and the gap between music and art seems smaller than ever.
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Mar 4, 2024Gordon manages to hit that sweet spot, creating an album that is adventurous, charmingly deadpan and visceral at every turn.
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MojoMar 1, 2024The Candy House's garbled distress flare or the My Bloody Neubauten of I Don't Miss My Mond confirm she is still picking up signals nobody else can, [Apr 2024, p.88]
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Mar 1, 2024Tracks such as Psychedelic Orgasm and It’s Dark Inside embody the claustrophobic and saturnine atmosphere on what is essentially an underground hip-hop record made by an inveterate envelope-pushing postmodernist.
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The WireMar 1, 2024Hard edged synths and massive, crunchy beats lend righteous swagger to Gordon’s bleary guitar squalls and jetlagged sprechstimme. [Mar 2024, p.46]
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UncutMar 1, 2024There's little identifiable guitar until track five, by which time anxiety and menace have taken hold thanks to the lumbering mien of "Bye Bye" and "I'm A Man"'s monstrous grind. "Shelf Warmer" lets in some air but it too is fabulously foul. [Mar 2024, p.26]
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Mar 7, 2024The Collective is thoroughly, classic Kim, but many of the odder choices – such as a truly annoying autotune appearance – seem to stem from deep collaborative dialogue.
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Mar 11, 2024Unfortunately, Gordon’s spiky, staccato delivery is too often drowned in distortion and diminished by tune-dodging cacophony. So many songs, such as Trophies, are tense yet torpid, and when the airless intensity clears briefly on Shelf Warmer it’s too late.
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