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.
The songs on Phonetics On and On have an emotional depth that far surpass the mysterious lyricism of their debut. Tracks like the bittersweet “Julie” speak on yearning and uncertainty during big life transitions. Reflecting on the band’s move to New York, Lowenstein sings, “We have so many mistakes to make. What do you want from them?”
“It's like [we] are seriously making decisions that we couldn't even possibly understand the long-term effects they [will] have on us because we're just trying to be adults for the first time,” Reece explains. Though these situations can leave them unmoored, the trio has each other to lean on. “Nora and I are roommates. Gigi lives 15 minutes away. I think we started to lean on each other in a very familial way,” Lowenstein says.
As the band matures and evolves, so does the music that inspires them. When Lowenstein first arrived in New York, she found herself wrapped in the soulful embrace of Al Green’s love songs—and heartbreak anthems—citing them as the soundtrack of those first few months in a new city. “I was really connecting with [his] songs lyrically in a way that I never did before. As a teenager, I was just attracted to raw energy,” she explains. “Maybe I became more sensitive and emotional when I left home and was having stronger feelings and I started to connect with music being like, ‘Holy shit, these feel like universal feelings and this person and these words are communicating something that I feel right now." This inspired her to get more personal in her own lyrics, wanting to form that kind of connection to her own music.
Meanwhile, Welsh musician and producer Cate Le Bon helped the band hone their new sound. Le Bon’s fingerprints and avant garde sound are found throughout the record. The band credit Le Bon to their embrace of a sense of play and discovery in the studio, rather than just laying down tracks for the sake of posterity or documentation, as they had in the past. “Her being an artist and a woman just was the perfect person to guide us into that experience in the studio,” Lowenstein says. Reese adds, “She really taught me how to talk about music [...] That experience will change the way that we record and write music forever.”
The trio mellow things out on the new record, shedding the need to be as loud as possible to make an impression or compete in the dude-fronted indie rock world. “2468,” with its staccato guitars and contrapuntal rhythms, echoes the punk experimentation of The Raincoats, while “In Twos” channels the brooding minimalism of Young Marble Giants, using silence as punk power. The clean guitars,empty space, and deadpan vocal delivery create an unnerving tension that is much more aggressive than crunchy guitars and pummeling drums. “I think our attitude, our childhood juvenile punk ethos is still really there,” Reese says.
Ironically, it was the band's embrace of their wunderkind reputation and aesthetics that became the very foundation for their sonic maturity. “We have had this image in our minds from when we started figuring out the sound of this album of children's recitals and plugging the guitar directly into the amp,” Cheng explains. “If you mess up, you're going to hear it. The sweetest thing is when there's a mistake that is really janky and weird.”
That whimsical, childlike perspective is reflected in the songs themselves, which use the basic chords they learned as kids and the schoolyard throwback of filling entire verses with “la-la-la.” It’s in the visuals: the music videos and single art lean into that kindergarten vibe, referencing children’s book illustrations, pastel drawings and patty cake choreo. It’s even in Cheng’s approach to her guitar playing. “[Years later] I think I've still maintained this [feeling that] every time I pick up guitar, it's like a new instrument,” she explains.
Ultimately, Horsegirl are growing up — but that doesn’t mean they’re leaving who they were behind; it’s common in your early 20s to feel a certain tension with your childhood as you’re figuring out who you’ll become. Horsegirl are pointedly drawn to images of innocence and budding experience. “There is something about this aesthetic of girlhood that was really appealing to us,” Lowenstein says. “A reclaiming of femininity in terms of the aesthetics that felt really powerful to us.” The embracing of all things juvenile could be a nostalgia for home as the band has moved away, or just the melancholy introspection that comes with growing up. Lowenstein explains, “Because I was writing about personal things on this record, I felt like this was the record that I owed my younger self.”
It's a bold shift to follow a loud, chaotic debut album with a minimalist rock record focused on girlhood — a change that Horsegirl is clearly aware of. “We used to a little bit actively avoid our femininity in spaces because our heroes were '90s indie rockers,” Reese says. “Part of what fuels us is we want to take up space, we want to get on stage and do something you weren't expecting.” As the trio gears up to tour the east coast and Europe later this year, they’re leaning into subverting expectations. They’re not afraid of what longtime fans might think. Reese admits, “We are a little bit fueled by that shock factor.”
