RIFF’s best albums of 2024 include Kendrick Lamar, Billie Eilish, Magdalena Bay, Allie X, Kim Gordon, ScHoolboy Q, Kali Uchis, Adrianne Lenker, Knocked Loose and Clairo. If you haven’t read it yet, you should start at the beginning of our countdown. Caught up? Part two includes some big names…

Kim Gordon, “The Collective.” The second solo album by Kim Gordon, The Collective, is a little like the beginning of Charles Dickens’ “A Tale of Two Cities,” as it sounds like both the best of times and the worst of times. The Collective Kim Gordon Matador, March 8 9/10 Get…

Sonic Youth, “Live In Brooklyn 2011.” Sonic Youth was my generation’s Camelot. Too young to see Kennedy in the White House, our fin de siècle kingdom was a prolific noise band helmed by grunge’s ultimate power couple, Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon. The band meant a lot of things…

Kim Gordon performs at Mosswood Meltdown in Oakland on July 2, 2022. Courtesy Meri Brin. OAKLAND — Impeccably dressed in a shiny black and white suit jacket, legendary filmmaker John Waters stood on stage in the gathering dusk amid towering oak trees and plummeting temperatures Saturday night to introduce…

Sonic Youth, “In/Out/In.” My parents divorced when I was 7. The separation not only meant spending every other weekend with my dad and his new girlfriend; the fracturing of my family made me skeptical that any love could survive the perils of modern life. For a time in my…

Kyle J. Kohner checks in with his own list of the best albums of the year. The first part includes ALCEST, Patriarchy, slowthai, Rico Nasty & Kenny Beats, Danny Brown, Tōth, Richard Dawson, Kim Gordon, Weyes Blood, Deliluh, Chasms, Better Oblivion Community Center, Chemical Brothers, Billie Eilish and Mount…

Kim Gordon’s No Home Record reminds me a little of the episode of The Simpsons in which Barney, the town drunk—after a successful run in the local barbershop quartet—begins dating a Yoko Ono type. At the bar, she orders “a single plum, floating in perfume, served in a man’s…