The In-Betweens of Horsegirl

Everything feels in flux when entering your twenties. Leaving the house you’ve always known, the friends you’ve always had, the scenery you’ve always seen. Packing all your belongings into a suitcase that’s too small and going somewhere where everything is different. This is the score of getting older: the friendships lost and the friendships gained, moving forward across time and distance. In 2021, right before recording their Matador release Versions of Modern Performance, the members of Horsegirl found themselves at this critical point. After graduating high school, guitarist Nora Cheng and drummer Gigi Reece were moving to New York, with Cheng set to attend NYU. Guitarist Penelope Lowenstein, a year younger, was staying in Chicago to finish high school. How does one keep a band alive when everything in your life is changing?

“My freshman year of college, things just felt kind of unstable,” Cheng tells me over Zoom, “and it was really fun to be at a new place—I feel like I made so many new friends, and then it’s kind of like, since then, which ones stuck?” That first year was challenging, as it is for any college freshman. Reece describes this strange space the band occupied: two members in New York, one in Chicago, an album recorded but not yet released. “That first year, where it was just me and Nora here and Penelope was back there, felt really confusing for us as a band,” they say. However, out of that uncertainty, something new emerged: Horsegirl’s sophomore album, Phonetics On And On, explores the vulnerability of growing up and the evolution of one’s individuality. It pushes the trio dynamic to greater heights, capturing a youthful energy that only best friends could create.

Lowenstein and Cheng first met in middle school, bonding during a School of Rock program. The two initially connected over their love of underground music: Television, Sonic Youth and the like. Soon after, they met Reece at a local show, rounding out the trio. The three would practice in Lowenstein’s parents’ basement, covering Sonic Youth’s “Incinerate,” among other noise-laden tunes. “We became friends as we started the band,” Reece recalls. “Our closeness really formed by going through the experiences of writing together, playing shows together, and trying to feel confident enough to share it with other people.” In the early days, still underage, Horsegirl would perform anywhere in Chicago’s musical circuit, starting at record stores, then turning to open-mic nights and dive bars. They were hitting their stride, but then the pandemic hit.

In a way, lockdown was a silver lining for Horsegirl. Lowenstein, Cheng and Reece attended different high schools, so band practices were usually confined to late nights and weekends. But when classes went online, the trio could spend more time together. “We would literally take Zoom school in the same room, and then spend all of our free time together,” Cheng reminisces. It was during this time they came into their own as a band, realizing the ways to create music as a trio. They put out Ballroom Dance Scene et cetera (best of Horsegirl), a ballsy name for their first EP.

Mere days after that EP came out, the Chicago Tribune declared the band was “racing against time”—racing against graduation that upcoming spring, racing against the ever-worsening pandemic, racing against their own adolescence. “It just felt like nothing was really going on in our day-to-day lives,” Lowenstein remembers. “And then this really big shift happens.” Matador Records wanted to sign them. Looking back on it, those moments felt surreal to Horsegirl: their music reaching a wider audience, albeit still in the digital realm of Zoom calls and Gmail exchanges. “I think my parents thought it was an email scam,” Lowenstein adds, all three laughing. By that April, they were officially signed and charted out to make their debut record.

In the summer of 2021, still masked up, Horsegirl lugged their gear to Electrical Audio, the famed recording studio owned by the late Steve Albini. “He gave us the tour,” Reece says with a grin on their face. “In the jumpsuit!” The choice was fitting, given the studio’s philosophy-slash-obsession with replicating live sound. “We were teenagers going to record in a studio for the first time, and we really felt strongly, like, we don’t want anybody else’s hands on this creatively,” Lowenstein adds. “The goal was to record [the album] exactly how it sounded in my parents basement.”

The result, Versions of Modern Performance, was an experiment that wrangled sheer noise into pop-inspired melodies. You could imagine these scenes in a dark Chicago basement just as easily as Albini’s studio: distorted guitars shaped into catchy harmonies, by the end of the song, careening into chaos. Underneath, a snare pops in imperfect rhythm. Repeated vocals veer into stream-of-consciousness: “turning away, can’t make it out, out loud,” Lowenstein and Cheng ramble on “Anti-glory.” Their voices have an indefinable quality: Chicago accents morphed into these strange, diaphanous murmurs. Against all the noise, though, some pop elements poked through. The noise isn’t some masochistic way of killing their audiences’ ears. Instead, they wrestle it into their own, making the Wall of Sound something approachable. “Billy,” the Modern Performance closing track, featuring Steve Shelley of Sonic Youth, is a bumbling, oscillating, stumbling effort; slipstream vocals at times imperceptible in front of crunchy guitars, trying to keep the two halves in balance.

The B-side to “Billy” was a cover: the Minutemen’s “History Lesson Pt. 2.” With Chang and Lowenstein singing, D. Boon’s slow, nasal musings are now pitched up, their guitars accompanied by a hint of distortion. “Me and Penelope playing the guitar,” Cheng says in the final verse, a hint of laughter in her voice. If the Minutemen wrote the song about their San Pedro musical compatriots, almost fifty years later, Horsegirl found themselves reflecting on the same situation, back on a burgeoning Chicago scene.

During the pandemic, Kai Slater, guitarist for Lifeguard and Sharp Pins, wanted a way to build community in a time where connection was limited to Zoom calls. The solution: make a zine. Hallogallo, named after the NEU! song, started in early 2021. Its first issue was simply dedicated to their friends: Dwaal Troupe, Friko and, of course, Horsegirl. “We want to come out of this with something tangible,” Reece says about the Chicago scene. “After COVID, it felt like such a powerful thing. All these kids that haven’t been to shows in so long, and they’ve been isolated, working on their own things, and then we came together, and really, like, loved each other and supported each other.” Slater says, “[The] zine helped build some kind of more visible community that has grown a lot outside of the pandemic. I’ve gotten a lot of letters and emails from people in the UK, France, Japan, Switzerland, Portugal, etc., just people that are inspired by what’s happening in Chicago.”

In the years post-pandemic, the Chicago scene has made a huge jump out of the Windy City. Hallogallo now books shows and raves, assembles mail-order tapes, and their recent issues contain interviews from Stereolab’s Laetitia Sadler and NEU!’s Michael Rother. Lifeguard, Slater’s punk band that features Lowenstein’s brother Issac, also got signed to Matador. Friko signed to ATO. Free Range put out their debut, and now they’re touring with Jess Williamson and Slow Pulp.

As for Horsegirl, Versions Of Modern Performance shot to the top of year-end lists in 2022, aweing audiences with their ‘90s-inspired noise rock. They opened for the Breeders and Pavement, some of their musical heroes. They played to sold-out crowds at Lollapalooza and Pitchfork Fest. The three have grown up together, moved to a new city, met new friends. In other words, they’ve grown a lot in the past couple of years. About 800 miles separates New York from Chicago, and their high school days are receding further into the past. “I think you can tell how much life we lived in between record one and record two,” Lowenstein says. “I think so long as we don’t rush into making something without having processed life a little bit, then we’ll end up making something different and evolve.”

On Phonetics On and On, with a few extra years of experience under their belts, Horsegirl begin to explore the trio dynamic in new ways. “On the first record, the noisiness was us trying to make sound beyond what the three of us literally were,” Lowenstein muses. “[But] there’s this natural emptiness to when three people play together that is really beautiful and also super vulnerable and strange.” Inspired by the lush, minimal pop songs of the Velvet Underground, Horsegirl went into the studio searching for something unique. Expanding beyond distortion pedals, the band looked to push their limits, questioning what music a trio could make. The new record captures the same whimsical, playful energy as the debut, but instead of being hidden beneath noise, Phonetics On and On brings those moments to the forefront.

“2468,” the album’s lead single, begins with the subtle drones of a viola, picking up speed behind Reece’s drums. Listen closely, and you will hear whistling in the background. Eventually, Lowenstein’s rhythmic voice kicks in, and a twangy guitar slips into place. “Two, four, six, eight,” she talk-chants, evoking the cadence of a hopscotch game. Alongside the counting, rhythmic claps bounce underneath, two motifs carried over from Versions of Modern Performance. “That’s some dumb stuff we love to do,” Reece quips, garnering laughs from their bandmates. “We will always do some shit like that.”

The rest of the record takes a similar form, moving past noise and exploring the absence of it. On “Sport Meets Sound,” each instrument combines into something greater than its parts: short rhythmic guitar slides, occasional hits of a bass string, the shake of a tambourine. Hushed voices stack atop each other. The song clambers on, reaching an apex as the tempo speeds along. If the first record had shades of Sonic Youth and the Breeders, Horsegirl’s new direction is fully in the direction of the Raincoats and Kleenex. “It’s a very empowering thing to listen to,” Lowenstein says of those bands. “How do you make a different kind of rock record, or how do you make a more playful, more feminine punk record?”

The band also credits the new direction to their producer, confidante and self-described mentor, Cate Le Bon. Changing their approach to the studio entirely, the band took fully-formed songs to Le Bon but slowly reworked them in the studio. “Julie,” for instance, was written on acoustic guitar and imagined with that accompaniment at the forefront. But, when a mixing error left the guitar off the song, it morphed into a haunting, synth-heavy song. The song wasn’t like anything they’d envisioned, but was it still good enough to keep? “When you have someone like Cate there, who’s like an outside perspective who we really trust, she was able to be like, ‘no, no, no, this is so cool. Like, trust me, this is so cool.’ We were able to take risks that I think really paid off,” says Lowenstein.

Horsegirl trekked back to Chicago to record these songs, effectively locking themselves in Wilco’s Loft during the dead of winter break. In their own idiosyncratic way, the members of Horsegirl developed a certain type of language with Le Bon, tweaking how a snare sounds in the mix or the reverb on a guitar track, for instance. “We kind of developed this group of vocabulary with Cate on how to describe sounds or what we wanted,” Cheng recounts. “It was very abstract, but by the end of it, we were all on the same page about these terms that maybe, like, out of context, you would not understand what we were saying.” As teenagers trudging into a studio for the first time on Versions of Modern Performance, walls of control panels and rack units were a daunting challenge to overcome. But with Le Bon, the band developed this comfortable feeling in the studio, translating the ideas in their head into something concrete.

That feeling is immediately evident on the record: instead of staying within the confines of guitar-guitar-drums, as with Versions of Modern Performance, the trio began using new instruments, picking up what was lying down at the studio. Cheng describes picking up a viola for the first time, somehow always out-of-tune. Holding it like a cello, she would play it “the only way [she] knew how,” bringing an “intuitive nature into these songs.” Most notably, though, their minimal sound gives the band more lyrical space to explore. On the new album, Horsegirl’s lyrics gain a new sense of vulnerability, exploring the pains of growing older. The songs capture those small moments of making a new life: long walks around the block, laying on the floor of a new apartment, sleepless nights in a tangle of sheets. It’s the kind of self-understanding that comes with age: the life lived between high school and college. “I Can’t Stand To See You,” in particular, represents new territory for the band, capturing the weakened last moments of a relationship, the feeling that you barely know the person you’re with.

Yet, the album also narrates the change that comes with growing out of adolescence. On first listen, “Frontrunner” stands out against the rest of the record. On an album of synths and quickened guitar runs, the track begins with the strums of cowboy chords, followed by a slow bass melody that could be ripped from the soundtrack to a spaghetti western. Lowenstein and Cheng’s voices fade in, their harmonies complementing each other. The song captures the close moments of friendship, the ticks of a clock waiting for someone to wake up or come home. “It was a really sweet day,” Lowenstein says. “I was having a really bad day, and Nora was, like, ‘we should just play guitar together.’ We spent all day writing that song on two acoustic guitars, and the recording is exactly the arrangement that we did here. I’m glad that we captured that sort of intimate, vulnerable moment.”

In a place like New York, where your sense of self can disappear in a second, those moments beside a close friend are incredibly stabilizing. The feeling that someone understands you more than anyone else can ground you, keep you level-headed. Now a college senior, Cheng will graduate from NYU this spring. Lowenstein still has another year to go. “I feel like this time together has been really formative for us, moving away from a city as a band,” Lowenstein says. “But, I do think there’s sometimes a ‘where is home’ feeling—being torn between Chicago, which we all feel very dear to, and New York, which has allowed us to find our own thing.”

At a time when Horsegirl goes through intense change yet again—deciding what comes after college—Phonetics On and On is a document of their tumultuous and exciting times away from home. “[On this record], I feel a sense of self and something that felt distinctly Horsegirl to me. I wonder if we’ll feel as much of a need to create the opposite of something we’ve already made,” Lowenstein says. Regardless of where the band ends up, the music will have to keep evolving. First apartments, first loves, first days of classes: Phonetics On and On captures those moments of reflection, and the joy of doing it beside those you love most.

Read: “Horsegirl Find Resonance Through Repetition with Phonetics On and On“

Ben Arthur is a writer based in Nashville. His work has appeared in Bandcamp, BOMB, No Depression, and Aquarium Drunkard.