The high-tech was once handmade. From the 1950s through the 1970s, computers stored data in ceramic rings called cores. These cores were strung with wire by a single worker and formed a neat grid of power and memory. Electricity being sent to one core would induct the adjacent wires, the activation of one bit empowering its neighbors. As a data storage solution, it was effective: each core could retain its data even if it lost power. As a craft object, it was elegant, a loom of information partway woven. This interdependent system of lines intersecting tiny nodes of history was called a coincidental core memory matrix, eventually shortened to “core memory.” Like so much language and culture, that phrase has drifted from the abstract to the physical, only to wind up as a metaphor that feels completely unrelated—words that were once meant to describe an arcane bit of computer science history are now used to refer to having really liked something as a child. Like a scrap of data, the phrase holds its origins in deep storage, even as it’s powered by the meaning inherent within it; despite the overwhelming power and influence of capitalism, things always drift back toward the human.
bitknot plants another peg in the circuit board. On Feeble Little Horse’s third album—and first without founding member Ryan Walchonski—the Pittsburgh trio uses production tricks left over from Sebastian Kinsler’s time making beats and singer Lydia Slocum’s voice to wind sharp critiques of big tech around crunchy indie rock. While they haven’t lost the homespun charm that made 2023’s girl with fish feel like a particularly twee take on Swirlies-esque slacker shoegaze, their command of their sound has increased dramatically. The songs on bitknot are heavier, uglier, and far more glitched out than those on their predecessor. They’re also lovelier, more full of life, and more empathetic.
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The components might be familiar—guitars that sound like they’re played through a busted Zenith TV at full volume, heavy acoustic strumming à la ’90s folk-grunge group Days of the New, Slocum’s fading read-out of a voice—but they’re all pulled into slightly unusual shapes. It’s just enough to catch you off guard; while you’re trying to figure out why “Dior”’s main riff sounds like it’s missing a couple of notes, Slocum’s take on how capitalism puts us into competition with one another slides in almost unnoticed. Like the systems it challenges, bitknot tries to rewire how you think and feel.
The songs are largely built around grimy riffs whose smears of overdrive sometimes blot out Slocum’s voice and make the record feel like a sonic cousin to Psychocandy, so it feels weird to insist that this is music you need to hear in good headphones. And while there’s always sunken treasures hiding in shoegaze’s murky waters, so much of the sonic detail on bitknot bolsters the writing, upping the emotional impact of the songs. After a guitar punchout opens the record in the first seconds of “Doorway,” the band settles into a homemade Stereolab groove, while a distant guitar that sounds like a calliope feels like a marshmallow pumps along. “Paris” seems to emerge from the fallout of “Dior,” its beatific vision of family vacation turned hyperreal and mildly horrifying by the way processed windchimes and field recordings of passing cars make it twinkle in the sun. Even the individual guitar tones feel set to the narrative tenor of the songs; the circle of distorted harmonics that ping through the dire “DMT” (“death, money, tech”) spin like a rusting can opener through tin, as if they’re mimicking the way the internet rips us apart to harvest the meat within.
