Horsegirl played a “secret” set at Night Club 101 last night

Last night (May 5), Indianapolis ragtag rockers Good Flying Birds played a rowdy headlining set at Lower Manhattan’s Night Club 101. Unfortunately, it ended with vocalist and tambourine player Susie Slaughter getting hit in the head by a swinging speaker during a particularly wild push pit (our best wishes for Susie’s recovery, and a note to overeager fans: mosh responsibly). Supporting Good Flying Birds were local post-punk outfit Debris Bardot and a new band called Danger Boss, who turned out to be the Chicago-bred rock trio Horsegirl, to the surprise of nobody in the room.

A quick word about so-called “secret” shows: Does it really count as a secret show if the band’s true identity is revealed in the venue’s public weekly events newsletter? This was a worse-kept secret than Cameron Winter’s surprise show at TV Eye under the alias “Chet Chomsky” back in January (all but one person I spoke to in the week leading up to that one referred to it as “the secret Cameron Winter show”). I’m all for dropping hints, but if the show is supposed to be an if-you-know-you-know type of event, let’s at least try to maintain an air of mystery. 

Anyway, I was not surprised to see Nora Cheng, Penelope Lowenstein, and Gigi Reece take the stage, but I was delighted. The trio opened with “In Twos,” an earworm off their excellent 2025 record Phonetics On and On, before diving into “Rock City,” which began with Cheng taping down one of the keys on her keyboard to sustain a single, ominous note for the song’s duration. The set consisted of Phonetics tracks and some “new” and “borderline unfinished” material from the untitled, unannounced Horsegirl record that Cheng, Lowenstein, and Reece are currently working on. From the sounds of it, their jagged, primitive, minimalistic style remains but has begun spiraling into looser, more jam-based structures—at least in the current iteration of these songs.

“If I don’t write a novel soon / I might be through / With every word I’ve said,” Cheng sang on one of the new songs. Here’s hoping that we hear more from her and the rest of the Horsegirl gang soon. In addition to unreleased material and cuts from Phonetics On and On, Horsegirl played their charged post-punk anthem “Anti-glory,” commanding the crowd to “dance!” along to the Versions of Modern Performance centerpiece—a surprisingly rollicking end to an otherwise mellow set. As intriguing as the teasers were, it was nice to see Horsegirl let one of the old favorites rip. 

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