‘The Collective’ Is Kim Gordon’s Coolest Act Yet

The day she turned 60, the artist and musician Kim Gordon felt, by her own admission, “shipwrecked.” She had recently gone through a painfully high-profile divorce from her husband of 27 years, Thurston Moore, and in the wake of their split, their band Sonic Youth — the freewheeling and fearlessly experimental group that almost single-handedly defined the sound and ethos of American alternative rock — ended its 30-year-run. Plenty of people she loved attended her 60th birthday bash in New York, but she still felt unmoored.

Gordon’s 70th birthday party last year, though, was another story entirely.

For one thing, it was in Los Angeles, the city she’d grown up in and returned to in 2015. But also, as Gordon explained on a video call from her book-strewn home in late February, it doubled as a celebration of finishing her second solo album, “The Collective.”

“It was kind of great to have done that on my 70th birthday,” she said and laughed from behind tinted sunglasses. “Because I’d actually worked that day and felt a finality to the project, it was really satisfying.”

Not many artists welcome their 70s with a new album, and virtually none with a record as blistering and gloriously strange as “The Collective,” which has more in common with postmillennial SoundCloud rap than the dulcet tones of 21st-century indie-rock. (The title is partially inspired by Jennifer Egan’s novel “The Candy House.”) But left turns are business as usual for Gordon, a restlessly curious artistic polymath who has never settled for the conventional, expected or familiar.

“She’s one of those people that was meant to be an artist,” said the musician Kathleen Hanna, who has known Gordon since the early 1990s. “Painting, writing, music — she’s one of those people who was born to be around any kind of art.”

Justin Raisen, the 41-year-old L.A.-based producer who worked with Gordon on “The Collective,” noted that “Lots of careers go downhill with age, but there are also lots that go upward.” He cited as examples David Bowie, Leonard Cohen, Nick Cave — and Kim Gordon.