One of the greatest feats of songwriting—of any writing, really—is arranging words into combinations that no one else has ever constructed before. Contrarily, there’s also a challenge in taking a phrase or expression that’s been echoed a million times, and using it in a way that forces the audience to really think about these familiar words. The latter is where a record like Phonetics On and On, the sophomore effort from formerly-Chicago-now-New-York-based rock band Horsegirl, thrives. As its title suggests, Phonetics is a record closely concerned with the shape and texture of each sound.
This knack for making the familiar sound foreign isn’t limited to phrases or even individual words. The frequent passages of wordless vocalization on this record don’t feel like filler. All the “oohs” and “da da das” are instrumentation as much as they are lyrical diversions. They’re just another piece in the multi-faceted mosaic of sound that places Phonetics in the intersecting lineages of post-punk, art rock and twee pop, mapped out by forebears like Dolly Mixture, Shop Assistants, The Raincoats and—the influence worn most prominently on Horsegirl’s sleeves—The Velvet Underground.
The rumble of Gigi Reece’s drums ushers in the call-and-response hook of opener “Where’d You Go,” before the song spins out into a wiry, “Heroin”-reminiscent guitar outro, while more downtempo tracks like “Rock City” and “Julie” recall the eerie simmer of Velvet Underground & Nico’s most haunting slow-marches. Similarly to The Velvet Underground’s ever-influential debut, the Cate Le Bon-produced Phonetics has an affinity for stretching the distance between instruments and hypnotically fixating on a single musical element (akin to the punishing sheen of the guitar chords on “Venus In Furs,” or the dirgelike chimes parading through “All Tomorrow’s Parties”). Closer “I Can’t Stand To See You” is Horsegirl’s “After Hours,” a mellow singalong that begins with Nora Cheng extending an invitation: “Do you want to go home now? / The night’s almost through / Let’s sit on the floor now / And talk, me and you.” A copy of Lou Reed’s classic solo album Transformer lurks in the background of the “Switch Over” music video as a piece of blink-and-you-miss-it set dressing.
The members of Horsegirl were in high school in Chicago when they signed to famed indie label Matador Records for their 2022 debut LP, Versions of Modern Performance (which made our list of the best albums of 2022). Along with bands like Friko, Dwaal Troupe, Sharp Pins and Matador labelmates Lifeguard, Horsegirl are a part of the Chicago-based Hallogallo Collective (named after a song by the 70s krautrock group Neu!). A multimedia project spearheaded by artist Kai Slater (who plays in a few of the aforementioned bands), Hallogallo’s website features a kitschy, brightly-colored interface and the collective’s slogan on the homepage in all-caps: YOUTH REVOLUTION NOW.
While Horsegirl and their peers are all still quite young—late teens and early twenties—they’re just starting to age out of the tired sensationalization that comes with being a young person who dares to make art that’s actually interesting and important. In the three years since releasing Versions of Modern Performance, the members of Horsegirl have relocated to New York for college. What happens, then, when a beloved stalwart of the Chicago teen rock scene grows up and leaves their home city? Rather than making their “leaving home” record a pointed assertion of maturity by taking a markedly explicit, heady or conceptual turn, Phonetics showcases the band’s most curious and playful impulses.
The short, snappy refrains of tracks like “Where’d You Go” and “Switch Over” pick just a few words to hold tightly and hammer into through rote repetition. On “In Twos” Penelope Lowenstein’s resigned, Nico-like musings (“Every good thing that I find, I find I lose”) flow over a steady violin march, while ambling guitar licks trail along. The following “2468” eschews the slow pace and ample auditory whitespace of its aforementioned companion song for the layered repetition of one lyrically sparse refrain: “2, 4, 6, 8 / Da da da da da da da da da da / They walk in twos / Da da da da da da da da da da / They walk in twos.” Listening to this nonsensical, double-dutchy hook feels a bit like eavesdropping on a group of kids making up a game or a secret language, but even describing it as such suggests that whimsy must come at the cost of expertise or substance. For Horsegirl, much like their predecessors—oddballs like Suburban Lawns and The Slits—this uncanny, childlike quality isn’t mere flourish, but rather a result of the kind of close attention that goes into isolating and unraveling a specific sound or idea and drawing the listener into a similar kind of defamiliarizing focus.
So many of Phonetics’ song structures revolve around taking something that is, at face value, simple or unremarkable, and repeating it until all association has been wrung out. It’s the same effect as flipping a lightswitch on and off, opening and closing the same door over and over again, or getting a single word or phrase so stuck in your head that a few minutes of letting it float around in there turns it to gibberish.
Many of the words I want to use to describe this record feel trite or insufficient. I want to say that this is an intimate record, an adjective that’s come to connote whispery, bedroom pop confessions and diaristic lyricism. But the intimacy of Phonetics isn’t so much a result of its lyrical content, but in its lingering focus and vast distance between up-close sounds, its embrace of stillness and simplicity. This record is intimate in the way that being alone with your own thoughts in a crowd is intimate; in the way that if you spend long enough living in a big city, its background noise becomes a naturalized aspect of your internal monologue. As someone who grew up in the city that Horsegirl are currently based in, their sophomore record sounds like walking around New York as a teenager—and returning to it after a long time away and re-treading all of my familiar-turned-unfamiliar stomping grounds.
I want to be a bit tongue-in-cheek when I call this Horsegirl’s coming of age album, or the album that sees the band members growing up. Phonetics doesn’t bear any of recognizable narrative hallmarks of a coming of age record (the idea of a “narrative” is almost irrelevant here), but I don’t know how else to describe an album that so succinctly sums up the rawness and malleability of oneself and one’s relationships during the transition from childhood to adulthood as Lowenstein does on “Julie”: “We have so many mistakes to make / Mistakes to make with you / You know I want them too.”
As I attempt to describe this record, the task of doing so continues to destabilize my own perception of the tangle of sonic, emotional and linguistic associations caught in a single word, or a single sound. It’s a strange way to interact with a record as fun as this one. On Phonetics, Lowenstein, Cheng, and Reece don’t just sound like they’re playing their instruments—they sound like they’re playing.
I keep coming back to the concept of defamiliarization—and to the experience of leaving a person, place or thing, returning to it, sensing that something has changed, but being unable to articulate how. Phonetics finds resonance in repetition, and ritual, zeroing in on its chosen conventions and getting to know them so well that they somehow become unknowable.
Grace Robins-Somerville is a writer from Brooklyn, New York, currently based in Wilmington, North Carolina. She is pursuing an MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing from University of North Carolina, Wilmington. Her work has appeared in Stereogum, The Alternative, Merry-Go-Round Magazine, Portable Model, ANTICS, Swim Into The Sound and her “mostly about music” newsletter, Our Band Could Be Your Wife.
