Horsegirl Announce Debut Album Versions of Modern Performance, Share “Anti-glory” Video
Photo by Cheryl Dunn
Horsegirl hive, assemble: The Chicago rock trio have announced their full-length debut, Versions of Modern Performance, coming June 3 on Matador Records, and shared the video for its lead single and opener, “Anti-glory.” Horsegirl will support their forthcoming album on a newly announced summer tour, starting with a hometown record release show.
Penelope Lowenstein (guitar, vocals), Nora Cheng (guitar, vocals) and Gigi Reece (drums) are best friends who met through Chicago’s youth arts programs—Cheng and Reece are college freshmen, and Lowenstein a high school senior, so “youth” is a key word there. The trio do everything collectively, sharing singing, songwriting, instrumental, and sound and visual art design duties. They recorded Versions of Modern Performance at Chicago’s Electrical Audio with John Agnello (Kurt Vile, The Breeders, Dinosaur Jr.), saying of the LP, “It’s our debut bare-bones album in a Chicago institution with a producer who we feel like really respected what we were trying to do.”
If “Anti-glory” is anything to go by, “bare-bones” may be a misleadingly modest framing of what Horsegirl have up their sleeves. The band’s output to this point, including their 2020-standout EP Ballroom Dance Scene et cetera (best of Horsegirl) and their 2021 one-off “Billy,” has skewed towards throwback shoegaze and no wave, but “Anti-glory” hits differently. Over Reece’s blunt percussion, Cheng and Lowenstein trade hard-nosed riffs and point/counterpoint vocals, as if they’re singing two parallel songs. Cheng’s dense lyrics evoke anxiety (“Feeding for a foe till it’s found”), while Lowenstein’s are like nihilism’s siren song (“Dance / With me please / If black / Turns to blue / Well, there’s nothing I can do”). The song’s two minds become one in its staccato dance-punk choruses, with Cheng and Lowenstein commanding us to dance as Reece stomps the kickdrum.
“We wrote ‘Anti-glory’ almost by accident, while messing around with an old song during rehearsal. The song fell into place immediately, and looking back, we have no idea how we wrote it,” the band explain in a statement. “As always, this song and album are for Chicago, our friends, our friends’ bands, everyone who can play the guitar, and everyone who can?t play the guitar.”
Horsegirl’s summer tour hits the E.U., U.K. and North America, and includes their first-ever shows in many of the U.S. cities they’ll hit. Their run begins with their record release show at Chicago’s Thalia Hall on June 5. Tickets for the newly announced shows go on sale Friday, March 11, at 10 a.m. local time.
Watch the “Anti-glory” video (dir. Erin Vassilopoulos) below, and find the details of Horsegirl’s album and their tour dates further down—new shows are in bold.
Versions of Modern Performance Art:
