Horsegirl – ‘Phonetics On And On’ review: indie trio go playfully back-to-basics

13 February, 2025

horsegirl phonetic on and on review

“I’m translating my talk to tones,” Penelope Lowenstein sings on the bright ‘Information Content’. It’s a line that passes by quickly but can be taken as a mission statement for ‘Phonetics On And On’, Horsegirl’s second album. It’s a record built on “ooh”s, “woo hoo”s and, most frequently, “da da da da”s, taking an element of the Chicago trio’s lyricism back to basic building blocks.

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When Horsegirl released their debut album, ‘Versions Of Modern Performance’, in 2022, the then-teenage band were hailed as the potential new young saviours of cutting-edge indie-rock. They pulled from a noisy pool of influences – Sonic Youth, My Bloody Valentine, The Clean – and injected those sounds with youthful curiosity and enthusiasm. Three years later, with singer/guitarist Lowenstein, singer/guitarist Nora Cheng and drummer Gigi Reece all graduated from high school and now living in New York, they’re honing their sound into something more their own.

The results are more spacious and clean but still a little charmingly rough around the edges – both musically and lyrically. Stripping back the words in places to bundles of phonetics brings a lighter and more playful touch to the album, even when the lines around them are heavy with gravitas. On the droning ‘Julie’, the staccato “da da da da” refrain adds some chiming levity to a song that ponders: “We have so many mistakes to make / What do you want from them?” Earlier, on ‘2468’, the more hurried “la da da da da da da” that takes over most of the song becomes a hypnotic tongue-twister as it changes speed, whirling over serrated strums of guitar.

For this record, Horsegirl took inspiration from an infamous Lou Reed quote that’s been guiding the experimentally minded for decades: “One chord is fine. Two chords, you’re pushing it. Three chords, and you’re into jazz.” Here, minimalism is the order of the day, each melody, bassline and beat purposefully centred around just what feels essential to that part or song. On album opener ‘Where’d You Go?’, that’s rolling rhythms and a bouncy, elastic call-and-response between bass and guitar; later, ‘Frontrunner’ shuffles softly through acoustic chords and an aching bassline.

Creating space doesn’t mean taking away room for experimentation, though. Horsegirl’s curiosity in the studio still shines through, like on several songs where Cheng layers in violin despite having no experience with the instrument. On ‘In Twos’, she rudimentarily plucks away at it, adding scratchy stabs to the drifting, gentle song. It, much like the rest of ‘Phonetics On And On’, works because of its lack of pretensions and its back-to-basics spirit. Second time around, Horsegirl are still recasting past greats in their own vision but finding more of themselves as they go.