Musically, Play Me is an album that relies primarily on Gordon's trap vocals, Raisen's industrial textures, and trip hop beats. Lyrically, Gordon focuses on aspects of modern life, such as U.S. politics and the rise of AI. Collaborations has Dave Grohl on "Busy Bee", playing drums on top of sped-up dialogue between Gordon and Free Kitten bandmate Julia Cafritz. The dialogue was taken from an episode of MTV Beach House that the pair guest-hosted in the 1990s.
Origins of the record date from June 2025 with "ByeBye25!" a reworking of the single "Bye Bye" from her 2024 album The Collective, with updated lyrics based on words flagged by the second Trump administration. It was accompanied with a black-and-white music video showing Gordon walking through a construction site. Proceeds from the single and associated T-shirt went to Noise for Now, a non-profit organization based on reproductive rights. Although it appears as a track on Play Me, it had been released as a standalone single.
The album opens with the catchy, toe-tapping title track, "Play Me" which recalls upbeat trip-hop acts from the late ’90s like Morcheeba. The chorus samples some chilled brass which is laid over some scratching in a way that’s both pleasurable and listenable. This is followed by a "Girl With A Look", which is built around a loop that feels disorienting and employed with repetition that instills a slightly nauseous feeling. Next is "No Nands" meanwhile, sees a welcome partial return of the sort of solid guitar riffing that characterized Gordon’s work with Sonic Youth.
Critiques of this societal development are to be applauded in the current climate, and I am all for people making them. However, the distorted warble on "Black Out" feels a little lacking in terms of contributing a unique viewpoint to the discourse, and making the phrase AI itself effectively the entire chorus of a song feels a little on the nose. "Dirty Tech" which follows it, is similarly heavy handed in its treatment of the same subject, with lyrics like “Are you my white-collar service worker?” The following "Not Today" makes for a satisfying conclusion to the album’s first side, dominated as it is by spacey synths and buzzsaw guitars.
Other songs like "Busy Bee" "Square Jaw"m and "Subcon" are dominated by hip-hop beats, and hearing the voice behind alt-rock classics like certain Sonic Youth's track such as "Death Valley '69". Gordon's voice blends with the beats better on “POST EMPIRE” and “NAIL BITER,” perhaps because the guitar being relatively high up in the mix helps to mitigate the incongruence between vocals and arrangement. The roaring guitar continues throughout the album's closing "BYEBYE25!," but again, the lyrics consist of Gordon intoning phrases presumably intended to allude to issue-oriented keywords like “electric vehicle,” “pregnant person,” “transgender,” and “hate speech.”
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