I’ve only visited Los Angeles once despite frequently returning to its sprawling noir imagery in some of my most beloved films and music. Yet, none of these—not even our Lady of Southern California, Lana Del Rey, or the master of its surreal seedy underbelly, David Lynch—has ever truly articulated my experience of contemporary Los Angeles. At least not quite like Kim Gordon does on her song “Psychedelic Orgasm” from her phenomenal new aural assault of an album The Collective. Ever the detached observer, Gordon paints a deadpan picture of the City of Angels, filled with Tik Tokers sipping on smoothies, $20 potatoes at the grocery store, ominous visions of fires under the freeway, and “bodies on the sidewalk,” a nod to the tents, addiction, poverty, homelessness, and general human suffering that lingers at the edges of any view of the city.

“LA is an art scene,” Gordon sings robotically through Autotune, one of the notable times on the record in which her voice raises above her prototypically apathetic spoken delivery, recognizable from the very best of Sonic Youth. Is that city, a city that feels like one big strip mall, really an art scene? Maybe. Talking with an Uber driver like I did on my singular visit about a plastic surgeon who nips and tucks his patients so they all resemble his wife does feel like some kind of art, as does voyeuristically listening into the inane conversations of fellow diners peppering their vocabulary with as much self-help drivel as possible. No wonder everyone in California is microdosing—articulated here with Gordon’s references to magic mushrooms, LSD, and MDMA. Despite the song’s title, the only orgasm here is chemical. There is no climax in the music itself—just a thick soup of abrasive guitar and synths that every so often halts for the sharp snap of a drum machine emphasizing Gordon’s observations of those pricy taters.

If this all sounds a bit vapid, it is. The Collective is an album that opens with the grating repetitive bleeps of a car door open alarm pulsing over a rapping recitation of Gordon’s packing list (“Hoodie, toothpaste, brush, foundation, contact solution, mascara, lip mask, eye mask, ear plugs…”), a lyrical choice so aggressively mundane that it reaches the sublime. Though “BYE BYE” is punishing in its level of drudging routine, it’s not the only song that pushes the boundaries of boredom. Take the ticking drum machine-driven “Shelf Warmer,” which narrates—you guessed it!—buying a shelf warmer at a gift shop. Of course, none of this is done or delivered without a heavy dose of humor. For instance, “Trophies,” punctured by the ever-present staccato yells of “Strike! Strike! Strike!,” boasts the most erotic bowling innuendo since The Big Lebowski with all that slippery imagery of waxy bowling alley floors and fingers in holes.

Though the subjects range widely from guitar-wielding Manson-esque cults in “The Believers” to incel whining in “I’m A Man” (“Dropped out of college, don’t have a degree. And I can’t get a date. It’s not my fault…”), The Collective is largely a trip through our vacuous hyper-consumerist, hyper-corporate, hyper-sexualized, hyper-inflated, hyper-influencer culture. There’s a reason the Pepto-pink cover features the recognizable shadow of hands holding up an iPhone, embarking on an endless scroll. With Gordon’s repeated assertion in the final song “Dream Dollar” to “cement the brand,” this black-screened blank generation is unmistakably ours. That doesn’t mean there isn’t also a glance toward a not-too-distant future dystopia, which comes on the second song, “The Candy House,” inspired by the book of the same title by Jennifer Egan (which also influenced the name of the album). Since I haven’t read the book (though it’s now on my list), I’ll let Gordon explain:

“…it’s this guy who rips off this research someone else has developed using algorithms and creates this kind of app. And through it, you can experience other people’s memories and how they felt. But in order to do that, you have to upload your own memories and experiences and join the collective, or the collection.”

Beyond just illuminating Gordon’s initial refusal in “The Candy House,” “I won’t join the collective,” Egan’s database of memories provides a key to the album as a whole, which comes off as if Gordon tunes in to channel various individuals’ memories—or really, scattered thoughts. This helps to explain some of the less comprehensible songs like “I Don’t Miss My Mind.” I mean, what the hell is she talking about?

“Crying in the subway
Remembering the day
The liquid kiss, you don’t exist
Your money breathes, I feel the leaves
Yeah, industry of nothing…”

Huh?

While nobody can deliver a line as overtly stupid as “Pass me that black napkin, please” with a singularly blasé attitude and alienated charisma quite like Gordon, what makes The Collective so thrilling is its sonic experimentation, which combines a heavy morass of guitar coupled—and oftentimes cut through—with trap beats and other more traditionally hip-hop flourishes courtesy of producer Justin Raisen who has worked with an eclectic group of musicians like Yves Tumor, Lil Yachty, and John Cale. This is not the first collaboration between Gordon and Raisen. 2019’s No Home Record has glimpses of the unchartered territory where the duo would eventually venture for The Collective in songs like “Paprika Pony.” However, No Home Record is also an inconsistent amalgamation of sounds that switch from track to track, from more straightforward post-punky rock to minimalistic noise. (My favorite song has to be “Don’t Play It” based on its evocation of pissing in the ocean alone). In contrast, The Collective fits together cohesively—so much so that the unexpected faint return of the jarring electric sawing of “I Don’t Miss My Mind” and alarm beeping from “BYE BYE” that floats into the conclusion of “Dream Dollar” blends seamlessly into the beginning of the album for a repeated spin. This is not to say that there is no progression. The Collective trends more guitar-forward as the album continues. Unsurprisingly, I tend to prefer the songs on the latter half of the album.

Like The Birthday Party’s overt declaration of their intention to construct “a prison of sound” on “The Friend Catcher,” Gordon too defines her own goals in “It’s Dark Inside”: “The song is breathing down my back, breathing down my neck, whisper in my ear.” The Collective succeeds in creating an air of lurking and looming, sometimes even oppressively. There is an inescapable immersive quality, submerging listeners into a near-relentless, blown-out, discordant wall of sound. It’s overwhelming and every so often actually anxiety-producing. This isn’t as awful as it sounds. In fact, it makes moments when this barrage lifts ever more transcendent like the pause midway through “The Believers” before Gordon’s howling vocals and ascendent ringing guitar rise above the earlier clanging and battering distortion or the sudden snap into a low-down dirty groove on “Dream Dollar.” These transitions deliver a physically ecstatic relief, a much-needed pleasurable breather. They are also responsible for why I keep listening to the album over and over, sometimes scrolling to those exact spots again and again.

It’s not as if I have a shortage of options for fresh music material. More than any other creative discipline (at least in my opinion), music is experiencing some sort of couple-years-post-pandemic renaissance this year. Industrial pioneers Einstürzende Neubauten fell into a pit of language and visited Niagara Falls to create one of their most infectiously listenable albums without forgoing the drill as a musical instrument on Rampen (apm: alien pop music). Chelsea Wolfe’s She Reaches Out to She Reaches Out to She and Nailah Hunter’s Lovegaze are both intoxicatingly mysterious witchy listens. Cindy Lee’s 2-hour-long Diamond Jubilee is a strange nostalgic transmission from another indie dimension where artists still have Geocities websites. Puzzled Panther’s plucky return to NYC rock n’ roll, mixing Gen Z with members of Gogol Bordello and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, on their self-titled EP is a pure joy. And even the new release of These Immortal Souls’ b-sides and live EXTRA proves, once again, that the guitar never was sleazier than in the hands of Rowland S. Howard.

However, it’s The Collective that is still whispering in my ear. My fascination with the album rests on the fact that it’s far from anything I’ve heard from Gordon before while also being unmistakably her. This is not to say there aren’t other antecedents here. Gordon’s vocals, particularly on “Dream Dollar,” remind me of the insistent yelps of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Karen O. The intro of “Trophies” is reminiscent of the beginning beat of Billie Eilish’s “bury a friend.” And the sharp, unrelenting electronica mixed with hip-hop is closer to Kanye West’s magnum opus Yeezus than anything from Gordon’s rock contemporaries. Yet, despite these and various other influences that flash into view while listening, the album also sounds, above all, deeply “Kim Gordon,” the raging guitar, the cool-to-the-point-of-frigid vocals, the breezily ironic subject matter. At times, The Collective is so Kim Gordon that it veers dangerously toward self-parody like the snide delivery of “The right stuff, no fluff” in “Shelf Warmer” or “Send in the clowns, send in the army” on “It’s Dark Inside.” Some may say this is a problem, but I’d disagree. If you can’t flirt with the line between idol and caricature at 70, what’s even the point?