feeble little horse finally releases bitknot on the first Tuesday of June, carrying over the wiry intimacy of Lydia Slocum’s introspection while sharpening its focus on toxic creativity, brittle friendship, and the feeling that memory itself can be monetized,
When the year’s only just started and half the indie universe seems to be holding its breath. feeble little horse lands with bitknot anyway—surprise-releasing the new album on a Tuesday. It comes at the start of June. and it arrives with a small. telling wrinkle: it’s not Horsegirl. the Chicago indie band whose latest LP is well over a year old. It’s horsegiirL’s debut album, the follow-up to 2023’s Girl With Fish, released by the Pittsburgh noise-pop trio.
The album’s sound is anything but still. Recorded across the trio’s homes in Pittsburgh. Pennsylvania. bitknot uses digital tools as an extension of the group’s knotty dynamic—sugary melodies rubbing against dizzying left turns. There’s no warm nostalgia for a simpler past. but there is a sharp preoccupation with the way memory and the self feel disassembled in the present cultural moment.
The opening track, “Doorway,” wastes no time. “The lawn is coated / My tongue is frozen / Against your silver neck. ” Lydia Slocum sings. and the sweetness has a texture to it—bleary atmosphere. icy wind. the sensation of something personal getting touched. Twee flares up briefly (“In the center / Best friends Forever”), then gets eroded by the lack of remembering. What follows isn’t just evocation. It’s a physical kind of record-keeping. framed as a “yearly jumpscare.” Sebastian Kinsler turns that impulse into a game. chopping and screwing Slocum’s vocals into a whimsical outro.
On “Poison,” the album narrows in on toxic cycles of creativity within capitalist culture. The lyrics don’t bother to make themselves easy to decode—“Ladder to the tree. I was chosen / Leaning on the part that was broken / Sucking on the fruit that was rotten”—but the emotion lands through rough-hewn guitars that offer something bittersweet rather than a clean answer.
“Rewind” plays like the record’s first real test of momentum, pushing toward a chorus that sticks. “It’s harder to rewind than / To see it at the same time / But if it doesn’t add up / Then I’ll see you at the end of the line. ” Slocum sings. switching meaning each time the line returns. The album’s sequencing holds together with a refreshing continuity: regret over success bleeds into the personal. and the question turns toward whether it’s divergent paths—or divergent selves—that made a dent in a friendship. Jake Kelley’s drumming stays dynamic without pulling focus from the arrangement’s clean surface. leaving little room for resentment to hide between the lines of Slocum’s curiosity.
Not every track treats memory as something you can soothe. “Shady” lets distortion simmer under the clean production, underscoring small discrepancies that can unhook a friendship from the past. Slocum shapes her words—stretching them into something mellifluous and meticulous—while making her effort feel deliberate. “I tailored this bit for you to read / And I’ll tip-toe as I go from A to B.” The record’s structure is built like that. too: group dynamics mirrored in the way the songs are arranged. the way the persona carefully calibrates who gets what.
Then there’s “Dior,” a return of blown-out guitars and shapeshifting production after several shorter, more subdued tracks. It’s where humor gets animated again. Slocum tells a guy his chances are “slim like my Virginias. ” and the fuzz culminates in a social scene she refuses to attend. “I’m not going to the Wednesday show. ” she sings. where “Kate saw you and she saw ✿.” (The lyric sheet transcribes the censor symbol as “✿.”) It’s delightful straight through. and that delight matters—because it’s often the cleanest moments that make the edges of the record cut sharper.
“Paris” leans into playful disorientation with woozy synths around “Oui. we don’t have to talk. ” like jet lag entertainment that still knows how to blur a conversation. “Cradle” follows with domestic bliss—or the echo of it—soothing the mounting confusion for a while. Unadorned, airy guitar chords lull the listener into a trance.
On “Upside Down. ” feeble little horse steep their sound in samples and synths after letting it out to dry. tightening the concept of being twisted inside out. The track draws a direct comparison in the listening experience to a Porter Robinson song—its closest equivalent on the record—without needing to pretend it’s the same.
“Guts” is where Slocum’s knotty poetic associations peak, matched by an especially wonky electronic riff. The artwork adds an explicit technological frame. It’s “based on the coincidental core memory matrix. which was used in old computers to store memory / access information using 0s and 1s. Each core. or ‘bit. ’ is accessed through the grid of wires. like a knot that stores secret details and memories.” From there the lyrics circle a harder question: what happens when those bits are auctioned off. monetized. diluted by our own patterned subservience—and whether anyone has the guts to hold off destruction.
“Shopping” keeps the pace rushing forward. It’s catchy and torrential. built around the album’s stickiest hook: “And would you fuck with these shoes?/ I wanna look just like you.” Parasociality teeters into paranoia along a thin line delivered in plain. relatable terms—so long as you’re familiar with Ssense and Ben Doctor.
“DMT” closes with discord made front and center. The track stitches in a sample identified as “That’s my shit right there. ” then moves into a “glorious breakdown.” It’s both for and about the average consumer who’s grateful to have their customized coffee order ready at the touch of a button while accruing debt just for being alive. Where “Shopping” leaned into blissful ignorance, “DMT” refuses it. The send-off also takes aim at expectation: anyone hoping for another “Pocket”-like moment of screaming and crashing out gets something else instead—“only this time squarely into oblivion.”.
feeble little horse bitknot horsegiirL Lydia Slocum Sebastian Kinsler Jake Kelley noise-pop album review Girl With Fish Pittsburgh indie music