At first glance, it seems like Horse Vision build their debut album, Another Life, from wholly familiar ingredients. Its drop-D tuning, rhotic vocals, and pastoral guitar passages would slot in nicely on the shelf between Alex G and Pinegrove. But then the Swedish duo of Johan Nilsson and Gabriel von Essen will throw in something unexpected: They interpolate a classic pop song, or get Swedish singer Tiffi M to sing an Auto-Tuned chorus straight out of a Porter Robinson track, or drop what might be the most heartwarming MIDI airhorn riff ever put to tape. Another Life isn’t strictly Americana, but it does feel informed by an American attitude, winking at the tropes of U.S. pop culture right now—gratuitous mashups, unblinking earnestness, shaky irony—in a way that only two outsiders could pull off. In the process, they craft something goofy but undeniably beautiful: an album that finds the potential for heartfelt sentiment even as it contends with the postmodern muck.
Horse Vision, for their part, position Another Life as the natural way to make art in the 2020s; in a statement, they affirm that the album aims “to depict the world of music, rather than the world itself.” That description might scan like puffery, but it makes a lot of sense when listening to Another Life. Zoom in, and this album feels like a piece of music criticism in the vein of, say, a DJ Earworm United State of Pop megamix. It credibly taps into indie music’s main modes right now (country, emo, and shoegaze) and nods to the primary ways artists try to subvert the expectations of those styles (hyperpop-adjacent synths, ambient passages, Auto-Tune). It does not sound like most new music in those genres, though: “Partly Get By” and “Another Life,” perhaps purely because of their accented vocals, sound a little like slowed-and-reverbed versions of songs by fellow Swede Bladee, and the album’s electronic elements are joyous rather than rooted in pathos.
It would be a wry parody of American indie culture if not for how earnest it all is: The album’s final lyrics are simply, “You are lovelorn/You are/Yeah, you are,” a terseness that’s reflected in the song’s disintegrating breakbeat. The scintillating “Chemicals”—the song with the MIDI airhorn—features a sappy, romantic chorus: “Can’t stop when my heart’s wide open/I give you my arms if you need them.” The closest analogue to Horse Vision might be A. G. Cook, best known as a hyperpop super-producer but whose solo work in recent years has prioritized fairly straightforward, earnest guitar ballads, only occasionally augmented by a bell or whistle. Both feel like an attempt to reconcile a love of “traditional” songwriting with the formless electronic maelstrom that has been sold as “the future of music” in various permutations for the past 20 years—and a disavowal of the idea that innovation requires abandoning what came before.
That belief is echoed in Another Life’s use of samples and interpolations. “11” samples the refrain of M.I.A.’s “Bad Girls”; “Animal” interpolates the Knife’s “Heartbeats”; “Partly Get By” feels like a screwed-up photocopy of “Where Is My Mind,” turning the Pixies song into a ravey post-rock track. These moments are funny and confounding, but not entirely illogical: All three of the cited songs attempt to marry the harsh and the anthemic, the sincere and the ironic, as Horse Vision does. Familiarity in music can sometimes be a curse; in Horse Vision’s well-studied, lovingly referential album, it feels like a gift—a way to strengthen the bond between past and future.
