For a band still in their early days, Horsegirl has already garnered plenty of attention — much of it, for better or for worse, centered on their youth. The trio’s 2022 breakout album Versions of Modern Performance was written when most of them were in high school, and reviews used words like “infancy” and “inexperience.” Often, critics were surprised that three Gen Z teens could find inspiration in ‘80s and ‘90s college radio rock. The acclaim came with an undeniable undercurrent of condescension, but the members of Horsegirl remain unfazed by it all.
“We’ve learned a bit about how to consume things that were being said about us,” drummer Gigi Reese, 22, tells Teen Vogue a few weeks before they’ll release sophomore album Phonetics On and On. “It all happened very fast, and we’re just reading everything there is to read about us. It gets into your head — the ways you think about yourself [and] your work.”
Those early whirlwind years have influenced Horsegirl’s surprisingly austere follow-up. Phonetics On and On is a departure from the noisy feedback-drenched songs of their debut, leaning into minimalism while embracing pop hooks and lyrical vulnerability. While most indie-rock bands would taken the success of that first record and run with it, doing whatever it takes to keep the forward momentum going, Horsegirl decided to pause, take a breath, and go to college.
Both guitarist Nora Cheng, 21, and bassist Penelope Lowenstein, 21, enrolled at NYU to pursue English degrees, bringing Reese along for the ride. “The choice for us to go to school and not tour all the time was to try and keep things joyful for us with the band and also to ground us,” Lowenstein says. The band credits that levelheadedness to their cautious, perhaps overprotective parents, who guided the then-teenagers while being signed to legendary indie label Matador Records. “We were 17 and 18 and I think it was only natural that they were protective, but I think that it has made us protective of ourselves and of each other,” Reece says.
The slow and steady approach gave the band some space to experiment and work on new tracks; so slow, in fact, there were times Lowenstein forgot she was in a band altogether, which allowed her to live a very normal, un-rock ‘n roll 20-something college experience. “The pause to just live life was one of the most important creative things that we could have done,” she says.
