You don’t always know what Horsegirl are singing about, but you know someone in the group does. Perhaps more than anything, their sophomore album, Phonetics On and On, delights in and charms through its deceptively childlike and unwaveringly playful language, which spins choruses out of practically every variation of “da da da.” Having moved from Chicago to New York between albums, the trio enlisted musician/producer Cate Le Bon to pare down and declutter the sound of 2022’s Versions of Modern Performance while amping up the absurdity in the subtlest places. Through the uncanniness and restraint, though, shines naked emotionality. “It’s oh so plain to see,” Nora Cheng sings at the very end, “How often I think sentimentally.” Whether repeating or tangling up the same words, Horsegirl make you want to sit down and listen.
1. Where’d You Go
“Far away” is the answer to the opener’s titular question, which rolls into a jaunty stream of “fah-la-la”s. The band members naturally sound tight-knit in the call-and-response hook, which invites listeners into this simplest form of play. The album’s shortest song, it presents the basic formula of Phonetics On and On – it could even have ended around the one-minute mark, but a spiky guitar outro adds an extra dash of fun.
2. Rock City
Critics who are quick to call Phonetics On and On a coming-of-age record should consider ‘Rock City’, which is about a shepherd who’s been watching the same sun sinking down the same hill for forty years. (Horsegirl’s median age is 21.) It’s a funny way of singing about the loneliness of growing old: “Shepherd’s got a hundred friends at home/ He says how do you do/ But no warmth in their wool.” As they turn the tempo down, you can feel it, too – though the last-minute switch-up gets me every time, and I’ve heard the record half a dozen times.
3. In Twos
In interviews, the band has talked about leaning into the “awkwardness and emptiness” of three people playing together live, something they make space for on ‘In Twos’. The sound is more downcast, the lyrics ambiguously personal: “Every good thing that I find, I find I lose,” Penelope Lowenstein laments. They flesh out the song with a lone violin, running through each repeated “And I try” like a knife ceaselessly sharpened.
4. 2468
Phonetics On and On isn’t a childlike album so much as a record about remembering what it’s like being a child, and few songs puncture through the veil of memory like ‘2468’. Giddy and freewheeling, the song is driven by the same slightly dissonant violin, which gradually becomes overpowered by the trio’s frenzied performances, Lowenstein’s bass getting thicker the more ridiculous the repetition becomes. It’s a little eerie when a childhood flashback hits you like the realest dream as an adult, and this single indelibly captures that feeling.
5. Well I Know You’re Shy
The band’s focus on pop songcraft shines through ‘Well I Know You’re Shy’, which keeps things clean, as if to accentuate how pure and sweet the singer’s romantic intentions are. There’s a bit of bitterness, too – “What happened out there, I wish it was me” – and Lowenstein’s deadpan vocals do little to disguise her yearning, nascent as it may be.
6. Julie
Definitely less nascent here, the album’s emotional centerpiece. Yet ‘Julie’ is less about unrequited love than it is about capturing the feelings that run deep regardless of how that love is distributed; that endure through the transitions of early adulthood. “We have so many mistakes to make/ Mistakes to make with you,” Lowenstein sings poignantly. The guitars themselves engage in a kind of dialogue: one steady and resolute, the other like it’s stabbing at some kind of truth. And halfway through an album chock full of da da das, who’d think they could cause such a pang.
7. Switch Over
Horsegirl dip back into subconscious territory on ‘Switch Over’, beating down the same refrain until it might just turn your mind off of whatever activity you’re doing – if only to make you concentrate on the music a few seconds. Ironically but no doubt intentionally, this is the most locked-in they probably sound on the whole record.
8. Information Content
This is simultaneously one of Horsegirl’s wordiest and most nonsensical songs, but it’s Lowenstein’s unfussy delivery that makes the wordplay so delightful. “I’m translating my talk to tones,” she sings, explaining the album’s unique linguistic logic.
9. Frontrunner
With its scrappy acoustic arrangement – the version we hear is exactly how it was initially written – there’s no song on Phonetics On and On that sounds more like a group singing to and for each other. Its playfulness starts and stops with the tension between anticipation and patience; the rest is pure devotion. Lowenstein and Nora Cheng live together, and ‘Frontrunner’ came together at the end of a terrible day for Lowenstein. “In the morning when you’re sleeping/ I can wait,” it resolves. There’s always tomorrow.
10. Sport Meets Sound
The band tries some new things with melody and rhythm, which is compelling, even if the experimentation somewhat distracts from the core of the song. Trimming it off would give the record a more appropriately concise runtime, though the outro gathers quite a bit of momentum.
11. I Can’t Stand to See You
The album closes off with a mellow, inviting pop tune that quickly opens itself up to the audience: “Do you want to go home now?” Chen sings. “The night’s almost through/ Let’s sit on the floor now/ And talk, me and you.” (It’s enough to make you rethink the meaning of ‘I Can’t Stand to See You’ – see what they did there?) Her mind wanders and can’t seem to shake off the same old song she heard on the radio. Some of the songs on Phonetics On and On might sound like you’ve heard them on the radio before, too, maybe even in a different decade. But they sparkle like new, time and time again.