Feeble Little Horse traffic in irony and contradiction. Their name bites its thumb at the waifish bedroom pop whose fragility their own music borrows and warps; singer Lydia Slocum’s Courtney Love bleach job and airy, disaffected voice make a cheeky contrast to the band’s jagged instrumentation. On their first two records, the Pittsburgh four-piece’s sludgy progressions evoked ’90s post-rock, but the hypermodern, computerized production hewed closer to contemporaries like They Are Gutting a Body of Water and Spirit of the Beehive. Their first single in two years, “This Is Real,” takes the juxtaposition between light and dark a step further, scavenging the Bandcamp archives of their feeble little peers and the sheen of hyperpop. If hyperpop and hardcore share some base resemblances—inhuman vocals (pitch-shifted roboticism, monstrous shrieks) and freneticism—then a group like Feeble Little Horse, fluent in both mock whimsy and heavier techniques, is perfectly poised to disrupt them.
In just three minutes, “This Is Real” flits between as many forms. When a broody bubblegum intro—featuring Slocum’s repetitive incantation about hotboxing a janky car and skittering samples that sound like video game bonuses—flips to an impenetrable wall of death metal distortion, the shock isn’t the difference so much as the similarity. The feelings carry over: overcaffeination and dissociation. 100 gecs on one side and Model/Actriz on the other have played with these boundaries before, but not with quite the same intensity. “If you’re not real, then I’m not real,” Slocum repeats hypnotically over a mounting riff, before she opens her throat and begins to scream. The group’s princess has clawed through her pleasantries.
