Horsegirl Went to Wales and Lost the Plot

By KAZI Magazine Staff, May 25, 2026

The guitar tone on Horsegirl's Phonetics On and On arrives clean, almost antiseptic, like someone ran a lint roller over every frequency between 200Hz and 3kHz. This is what happens when you take a band whose first record thrived on murk and grain and hand them to Cate Le Bon in a freezing Chicago studio with the intensity turned off for sound isolation. The Loft gave them clarity. It also gave them nowhere to hide.

Le Bon's production strips away the heavy saturation that made Versions of Modern Performance feel like it was recorded through a screen door, which was the entire point of that record. John Agnello's 2021 mix at Electrical Audio left space for mistakes, for room tone, for the kind of accidents that made Sonic Youth interesting before they started making records that sounded like Sonic Youth records. Horsegirl's debut ran 33 minutes across twelve tracks and felt like a band that understood brevity as a structural choice, not a limitation. Phonetics On and On stretches to eleven tracks and feels longer, not because of runtime but because every song arrives fully formed, professionally rendered, and missing the fertile chaos that made anyone care in the first place.

The lineage is obvious and Horsegirl has never pretended otherwise. They got Lee Ranaldo and Steve Shelley on their debut, covered Minutemen, and built their sound in the same Chicago DIY circuit that produced The Jesus Lizard and Tortoise before the lofts turned into condos. But lineage only matters when you do something with it. Versions of Modern Performance understood that Sonic Youth's best work happened when they were broke and hungry and recording in basements, not when they were elder statesmen making records for major labels. Phonetics On and On sounds like a band that forgot this lesson, or worse, never learned it.

The singles tell the story. "Billy" arrived in November 2021 sounding raw and coiled, the kind of track Rolling Stone calls essential because it makes them feel connected to something underground. "2468" and "Julie" from the new record are fine, competent, completely forgettable. The production is right there in the mix, audible and deliberate, which means you're thinking about Cate Le Bon's choices instead of what Horsegirl is trying to say. When your producer becomes the most interesting thing about your record, you've already lost.

The two-week session in January 2024 with no intensity might sound like romantic suffering, but controlled discomfort in a proper studio is not the same as figuring out how to make a 7-inch sound good on a four-track in someone's practice space. Horsegirl came up through Sonic Cathedral putting out brown vinyl splits, playing basements, making the kind of music that only works if you believe no one important is listening. Matador signed them and they made a debut that still sounded hungry. Two years later they made a record that sounds like they're trying to keep Matador happy.

The problem is not that Phonetics On and On is bad. The problem is that it is not necessary. Rock music in 2025 does not need more bands who sound like they went to production school. It needs bands who sound like they might break up before the next record, who are making music because the alternative is worse. Horsegirl had that urgency on Versions of Modern Performance. They traded it for clarity and better drum sounds and the kind of guitar tones that make A&R reps nod approvingly.

There is a version of this story where Horsegirl takes the Matador money and the Cate Le Bon pedigree and makes a record so polished and alien it becomes its own thing, the way Deerhunter did with Halcyon Digest. But that requires committing fully to the turn, burning the bridge back to the basement. Phonetics On and On tries to have it both ways, keeping the post-punk signifiers while sanding down everything that made them abrasive. The result is a record that will get good reviews and accomplish nothing.

Horsegirl is touring South America and Europe through 2026, playing festivals with catering and proper sound systems, which is what happens when you make the safe record. They are young enough to recover from this. The question is whether they remember why they started making noise in the first place, or if they've already decided that clarity is the same thing as progress.