I do not doubt that feeble little horse could make a pretty, catchy, straightforward pop tune that would unequivocally rock, but it’s much more fun to see all the innards and bones. That’s the Pittsburgh band’s specialty. From the post-punk start-and-stop of “Chores” to the buzzy freakout of “Pocket” to last year’s glitchy one-off “This Is Real,” feeble little horse has sucked hooks off the bones of traditional song carcasses. Structure, to them, is a mere suggestion.
While the band has been involved in this decade’s great shoegaze revival, their third album, bitknot, sounds reminiscent of the “laptop twee” trend that 2023’s Girl With Fish helped pioneer before it even had a name. &friends coined the phrase last year, and blogs like Nina Protocol and Eli Enis’s Chasing Sundays ran with it. “laptop twee” is exactly what it sounds like: the analog ethos of twee filtered through hyper-online, internet-native production and sensibilities. Often characterized by rapid oscillation between ironic detachment and crushing earnestness (and an obscured boundary between the two), it’s music for genre-ADHD-ridden (or just ADHD-ridden) indoor kids using digital tools of the present and rose-tinted nostalgia to piece together some semblance of a musical future.
Now that we’ve got Bassvictim’s Maria Manow singing Polish folk songs about her grandmother in between electroclash cuts, Ninajarachi warbling out mash notes to her computer and iPod touch, and every (hyper)pop girl from Jane Remover to Charli XCX picking up guitars and running them through distortion pedals, it’s safe to say that any distinctions between analog and digital—and pop and rock—are as flimsy and irrelevant as ever. bitknot drives that point home and punctuates it with a wink and a flurry of bleeps, bloops, and hums.
As the keen yet internet-lobotomized observer through which we experience the digital-physical world of bitknot, frontwoman Lydia Slocum is a nuanced narrator of online young adulthood in the age of acceleration. Sometimes, she and her bandmates go full doomer. They meet the excess and overstimulation of bots, deepfakes, and bets placed on everything with harsh, digitally manipulated guitar sounds that fill your skull and lyrics about the million dead ends of technocapitalism.
The title of closer “DMT” stands for “Death Money Tech” and splits skulls with its ragged, staticky guitar. You can practically feel Slocum’s eyes rolling as she sings “I’m so lucky, ‘cause it’s all for me.” “Dior” and “Shopping” both send up consumerism. The former uses the titular brand’s lipstick as a secret weapon of seduction and self-confidence that ultimately fails to satisfy its protagonist’s cravings; the latter sees Slocum dead-eyed and mid-scroll through the social media profile of an idealized other (“She’s in my feed, I need her clothes I need her hair / She’s just like me but prettier and it’s not far”).
Other bitknot tracks present the internet as a divine force for human connection and collective memory. With access to more information than any previous generation has had, both in history and of history, it’s never been easier to anachronize. It’s why most of the interactions that play out across bitknot’s twenty-five minutes are tinged with nostalgia, regardless of how long ago they occurred or whether they happened IRL at all. References to feeble little horse’s peers (“Not going to Wednesday’s show”) mingle with ones to their fallen predecessors (“You are not David Berman / You are not Kurt Cobain”). Fresh or not, the wounds still sting. Slocum’s voice flits through a starry and wobbly guitar arrangement and chipmunk backup vox, all swirling together in a constellation of digital dreampop, showcasing the real desires embedded in bitknot’s pixelated tangle of intangible projections: to know and be known, to shout through the portal and get an answer back, to be illuminated in the blue-light glow and—even if only for a moment—be seen. [Saddle Creek]
Grace Robins-Somerville is a writer from Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in Pitchfork, Stereogum, The Alternative, ANTICS, Marvin, Swim Into The Sound and her “mostly about music” newsletter, Our Band Could Be Your Wife.
