Phonetics On and On

The Artist

Horsegirl is a trio from Chicago made up of Nora Cheng, Penelope Lowenstein, and Gigi Reece, who formed as teenagers and bonded over a shared love of underground guitar music. Their 2022 debut Versions of Modern Performance arrived on Matador and pegged them as inheritors of a certain lineage: Sonic Youth, Yo La Tengo, the Flying Nun catalog, all filtered through the DIY scene they grew up in. The band trades instruments freely and shares vocals, giving their music a conversational, communal feel rather than a frontperson-and-backing-band dynamic. Since the debut, the members relocated for college in New York, which reshaped how they wrote together. Phonetics On and On is their second album and finds them paring back rather than filling out, a deliberate move away from the fuzzed-out guitar wall of their debut.

The Album

Phonetics On and On was released in early 2025 on Matador, produced by Cate Le Bon, whose fingerprints are all over the record's spare, angular sensibility. Where the debut leaned on layered distortion, this one strips things down to bare essentials: often just bass, drums, a single guitar line, and a voice, with plenty of room around each element. Le Bon reportedly encouraged the band to embrace minimalism and unusual instrumentation, and you can hear the trust in silence throughout. The songs are short, the arrangements almost skeletal, and the mood is more curious than urgent. Thematically the album plays with language, repetition, and the strange textures of everyday communication, treating words as sounds as much as meaning.

Listen For

The space in the mix. Notice how much air surrounds each instrument. Parts don't crowd each other; they take turns, and the silences do real work.

Interlocking parts over big riffs. Rather than power chords, the band builds songs from small repeating figures that lock together, especially on tracks like "2468" and "Switch Over".

Shared and traded vocals. Cheng and Lowenstein swap and stack lines throughout, sometimes speaking more than singing. Their deadpan delivery on "Julie" and "Information Content" is a defining texture.

Unusual instrumental colors. Listen for violin, piano, and other non-rock textures poking through the guitar-bass-drums frame, a Cate Le Bon signature that opens the palette without overwhelming it.

Language as sound. The lyrics repeat phrases, count, and play with phonetics, especially on "2468" and "Phonetics On and On"'s title concerns echoing across "Sport Meets Sound" and the closer "I Cant Stand To See You".