Rock band Horsegirl’s new album ‘Phonetics On & On’ finds energy in playfulness : NPR

When Horsegirl launched its debut Variations of Fashionable Efficiency again in 2022, it was clear the trio — nonetheless in or simply out of highschool on the time — possessed all of the marks of a Cool Band. Claiming critically adored, crate-dug bands like Electrelane, Belle and Sebastian and My Bloody Valentine as favourite teams and references for its sound in interviews? Examine. Converse-sung lyrics crammed with nods to The Jesus and Mary Chain and Gang of 4? Examine. Sonic Youth guitarist Lee Ranaldo and drummer Steve Shelley casually enjoying on the band’s debut? Examine! If there was a knock towards Horsegirl, it was that every one these trendy touchstones might litter a standpoint the band was nonetheless working to search out, on the heart. On the band’s sophomore album Phonetics On & On, Penelope Lowenstein, Nora Cheng and Gigi Reece as a substitute strip all of it again to deal with what actually issues: the ability of protecting issues playful.

Phonetics On & On is a compulsively replayable file stuffed with arrestingly catchy, bare-bones songwriting and twee treasures. If Horsegirl summoned a tsunami of darkish, shoegaze sound on its debut, right here the band strips every little thing again to the post-punk fundamentals, swapping extinguishing reverb for tightened manufacturing that emphasizes every member of the group as a person noisemaker. The trio labored with the eccentric Welsh artist Cate Le Bon and you’ll hear how properly her art-pop spirit works with Horsegirl. Collectively, they find the proper degree of musical restraint that also permits Horsegirl’s to trigger just a little chaos within the margins of those compact songs, like when an electrical guitar solo runs unfastened within the second half of jangly pop opener “The place’d You Go?”

The perfect elements of many songs listed here are simply wordless melodies, just like the refrain of the rollicking “Rock Metropolis,” Lowenstein and Cheng’s peppy “woo-hoo-ooh-ooh” line stretched out virtually like an extended, gradual whistle, or ridiculously easy, addictive tracks like “2468” or “Change Over,” on which Lowenstein and Cheng commerce the lyrics “swap over, swap off” in rapid-fire. That is unflashy, minimalist music, nonetheless indebted to the band’s retro references, but it surely does not really feel underdeveloped. It feels intuitive and earnest, made by a band making an attempt to construct itself from the bottom up by figuring out what’s enjoyable to play, what’s enjoyable to sing, even when that is likely to be a tossed-off, sped-up string of numbers that stayed lodged in my mind lengthy after first play. It is an album that captures the improvisational spirit of being in a room with your folks who’re additionally your bandmates, rapidly sketching out concepts into songs with out overthinking it. Usually, it seems like somebody within the band is simply making an attempt one thing out within the warmth of the track’s creation — somebody noodling their guitar into no matter path they please, letting a lyric flip into “da-da-da-da.”

There is a childlike, D.I.Y. directness that permeates Phonetics On & On‘s visuals, concepts and intentionally scrappy guitar strains that evokes the spirit of a bunch like Nineteen Eighties’ Beat Occurring, who forged its juvenile enjoying practices and lyricism as first thought, finest thought punk liberation. “I had by no means actually touched a violin earlier than,” Cheng advised Rolling Stone about utilizing the instrument at first of “2468.” “It seems like a youngsters’s recital. However enjoying an instrument you do not know, you get that innocence which you could’t pretend.” The final 5 years have additionally seen the rise of a speak-song, post-punk revivalist second in indie rock, dominated by bands like Dry Cleansing, Squid and the Grammy-winning Moist Leg. However whereas most of these acts strategy the mic with a desert-dry cynicism and wit, there is a nimbleness to Horsegirl’s strategy right here that all of the sudden makes all of the arty posturing of so a lot of its modern friends really feel overworked.

It is Horsegirl’s freedom on this album — not overthinking it, overworking it — that’s really magnetic. Listening to Phonetics On & On, I stored feeling like I had stumbled throughout a bunch of ladies enjoying bounce rope on some avenue nook, the playful however coordinated physicality of the music so accessible and seductive it is like a sport I might bounce into, be part of, contribute my very own “la-la-la”s. These are the songs you get if you observe your intestine and delight within the technique of creation, and all its surprises and enjoyable. “We have now so many errors to make — errors to make with you,” Lowenstein sings on “Julie,” the album’s centerpiece. ” I need them too.” In Horsegirl’s world, a mistake is not the tip of the world — it is an invite to maintain going, to maintain messing round and create one thing.