Horsegirl – Versions of Modern Performance

Horsegirl are a young band reimagining the guitar music of the late 80s and early 90s in their own, very modern image.

Album Review by Tony Inglis | 01 Jun 2022
  • Horsegirl - Versions of Modern Performance
Album title: Versions of Modern Performance
Artist: Horsegirl
Label: Matador
Release date: 3 Jun

The two college freshmen and a high school senior of Horsegirl weren’t even born when you were idolising your favourite now-legendary indie rock band, but they get them way better than you ever did. Over the course of their unabashedly DIY-sounding debut – whether that sound is merely an invocation rather than authentic, you can’t deny that it nails it – these songs walk the same line of art rock as Goo and Dirty-era Sonic Youth.

Lo-fi pop-leaning jams are interspersed with experimental, borderline ambient passages. Perhaps most confounding is how fun that can be. Horsegirl understand that Kim Gordon and Kurt Cobain (and all of those stars’ heroes) could write with tongues firmly in cheek – most contemporary versions of this music dispense with that altogether in favour of humourless posturing. This is most evident in their inversion of the classic Gang of Four lyric – 'Sometimes I’m thinking that I lust you, but I know it’s only love' – of which they manage to stick the landing.

Following The Linda Lindas earlier this year, Horsegirl are a band reimagining the guitar music of the late 80s and early 90s in their own, very modern image, channeling all the humour and lacking the conceitedness that retellings of those bands’ stories have all but forgotten.

Listen to: Bog Bog 1, Option 8, Billy

http://horsegirlmusic.com