When Horsegirl released its debut Versions of Modern Performance back in 2022, it was clear the trio — still in or just out of high school at the time — possessed all the marks of a Cool Band. Claiming critically adored, crate-dug bands like Electrelane, Belle and Sebastian and My Bloody Valentine as favorite groups and references for its sound in interviews? Check. Speak-sung lyrics filled with nods to The Jesus and Mary Chain and Gang of Four? Check. Sonic Youth guitarist Lee Ranaldo and drummer Steve Shelley casually playing on the band's debut? Check! If there was a knock against Horsegirl, it was that all those stylish touchstones could clutter a point of view the band was still working to find, at the center. On the band's sophomore album Phonetics On & On, Penelope Lowenstein, Nora Cheng and Gigi Reece instead strip it all back to focus on what really matters: the power of keeping things playful.
Phonetics On & On is a compulsively replayable record full of arrestingly catchy, bare-bones songwriting and twee treasures. If Horsegirl summoned a tsunami of dark, shoegaze sound on its debut, here the band strips everything back to the post-punk basics, swapping extinguishing reverb for tightened production that emphasizes each member of the group as an individual noisemaker. The trio worked with the eccentric Welsh artist Cate Le Bon and you can hear how well her art-pop spirit works with Horsegirl. Together, they locate the perfect level of musical restraint that still allows Horsegirl to cause a little chaos in the margins of these compact songs, like when an electric guitar solo runs loose in the second half of jangly pop opener "Where'd You Go?"
The best parts of many songs here are just wordless melodies, like the chorus of the rollicking "Rock City," Lowenstein and Cheng's peppy "woo-hoo-ooh-ooh" line stretched out almost like a long, slow whistle, or ridiculously simple, addictive tracks like "2468" or "Switch Over," on which Lowenstein and Cheng trade the lyrics "switch over, switch off" in rapid-fire. This is unflashy, minimalist music, still indebted to the band's retro references, but it doesn't feel underdeveloped. It feels intuitive and earnest, made by a band trying to build itself from the ground up by identifying what's fun to play, what's fun to sing, even if that might be a tossed-off, sped-up string of numbers that stayed lodged in my brain long after first play. It's an album that captures the improvisational spirit of being in a room with your friends who are also your bandmates, quickly sketching out ideas into songs without overthinking it. Often, it sounds like someone in the band is just trying something out in the heat of the song's creation — someone noodling their guitar into whatever direction they please, letting a lyric turn into "da-da-da-da."
There's a childlike, D.I.Y. directness that permeates Phonetics On & On's visuals, ideas and deliberately scrappy guitar lines that evokes the spirit of a group like 1980s' Beat Happening, who cast its juvenile playing practices and lyricism as first thought, best thought punk liberation. "I had never really touched a violin before," Cheng told Rolling Stone about using the instrument at the beginning of "2468." "It sounds like a children's recital. But playing an instrument you don't know, you get that innocence that you can't fake." The last five years have also seen the rise of a speak-song, post-punk revivalist moment in indie rock, dominated by bands like Dry Cleaning, Squid and the Grammy-winning Wet Leg. But while most of those acts approach the mic with a desert-dry cynicism and wit, there's a nimbleness to Horsegirl's approach here that suddenly makes all the arty posturing of so many of its contemporary peers feel overworked.
It's Horsegirl's freedom on this album — not overthinking it, overworking it — that is truly magnetic. Listening to Phonetics On & On, I kept feeling like I had stumbled across a group of girls playing jump rope on some street corner, the playful but coordinated physicality of the music so accessible and seductive it's like a game I could jump into, be a part of, contribute my own "la-la-la"s. These are the songs you get when you follow your gut and delight in the process of creation, and all its surprises and fun. "We have so many mistakes to make — mistakes to make with you," Lowenstein sings on "Julie," the album's centerpiece. "You know I want them too." In Horsegirl's world, a mistake isn't the end of the world — it's an invitation to keep going, to keep messing around and create something.
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