Hear Kim Gordon’s Goth-Industrial New Song ‘Murdered Out’

Kim Gordon takes American culture to the chop shop on her new single “Murdered Out.” The song was inspired by Gordon’s move back west to her native Los Angeles, where, she noticed a prevalence of black-on-black matte spray used on cars, windows, logos and wheels throughout the city permeating from the lowrider community.

“I was interested in how [black matte spray] is a subliminal way of X-ing yourself out of the culture,” the Body/Head guitarist tells Rolling Stone. “It’s intentionally restrictive; it reclaims something that’s shiny, fetishistic, what was once a driving force of American production and part of L.A. culture – the car. [Black matte spray] is away saying that there’s nothing in mainstream culture for you.”

The goth-industrial song features Gordon hissing the assonant refrain “black matte spray” as if smoothing over the scraping guitars and synthetic grind around her. The trashy drum loop (by Warpaint’s Stella Mozgawa) gives the song a reptilian, static power. 

Producer Justin Raisen hooked Gordon on the project by allowing her to write her own lyrics to the music, which came from unused vocal outtakes of another song. “The song was aesthetically more goth than I’m comfortable with,” Gordon said. She added lead and background vocals and her signature needling guitar to the mix. “I didn’t like the lyrics so I made up my own. It was a really freeing way to work – a conversation, really.”

To Gordon, black matte spray represents a rejection of status quo. “Like an option on a voting ballot, ‘none of the above,'” she wrote in a statement about the song. “[Black matte] is the ultimate expression in digging out, getting rid of, purging the soul. Like a black hole, the supreme inward look, a culture collapsing in on itself.”

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