Two years ago, HorsegiirL told NME that “making people happy is something I take quite seriously”. The masked German DJ (a.k.a. Stella Stallion) claims to have been discovered by chance by one “Whitney Horseton”, so when her songs ‘My Barn My Rules’ and ‘My Little White Pony’ went viral, Miss Stallion saddled up and became a festival staple. Soon, she was performing at hallowed techno spaces like Berghain, HÖR, Detroit’s Movement Festival – but just as quickly as she had risen, the DJ was having a proper mare thanks to severe burnout.
Consequently, HorsegiirL decamped to Ecuador for four months, where a pivotal ayahuasca ceremony inspired the bulk of her highly anticipated debut album ‘Nature Is Healing’. Admittedly, it all sounds a bit woo woo – and we’re talking about an anthropomorphic horse DJ, for Christ’s sake – but ‘Nature Is Healing’ balances sincerity with HorsegiirL’s whimsy for an album of stone-cold bangers.
HorsegiirL shows off her range with a string of surprisingly lush downtempo songs, a far cry from her reputation for high-energy happy hardcore. Vocals as silky as her mane complement the soothing trip-hop title track and the mournful, sinister ‘Connect The Dots’. It’s perhaps a little less effective on ‘Organic Intelligence’, whose gorgeous harps and strummed guitars can’t save HorsegiirL’s banal Biology 101 lesson: “We share our DNA with a banana or slug!”
To keep the tempo amidst these leisurely cuts, the DJ sends in a cavalry of infectious tropical-pop tunes. ‘That’s My Beach’ is a blissful house track tailor-made for Ibiza, while ‘Karma Is’ ingeniously blends a baile funk groove with shuffling breakbeats and a booming Jersey club beat. Meanwhile, the feel-good ‘Aura’ draws from HorsegiirL’s endearing naivety for the album’s catchiest chorus.
Though HorsegiirL mostly bridles her campier instincts, it naturally behooves her to have at least one techno track on the album. That’s ‘Apple A Day’, which riffs on the classic idiom “an apple a day keeps the doctor away” over punishing gabba kicks. Interspersed with outrageously obnoxious ab-libs (“Put yo muthafuckin’ apples uuuppp!!”), it’s topped off by a hilarious verse from a doctor, furious that HorsegiirL’s apple-munching has left him out of work.
There’s plenty of speculation about whether HorsegiirL is a major-label gimmick, but the DJ has openly spoken about her queer underground rave origins. That experience has undeniably informed HorsegiirL’s confidence barnstorming through a wide diversity of dance genres without getting lost. She might be known for horsing around, but ‘Nature Is Healing’ proves you shouldn’t take Stella Stallion for a foal.
