Horsegirl @ Islington Assembly Hall, 21st August 2026

Back in 2020, Horsegirl released one of the best songs of the decade.

Sea Life Sandwich Boy is just under five minutes of fuzzy, reverby joy.  From the opening anticipatory few seconds to the building crash as everything kicks into gear to the pair of guitar lines, one chiming and clear, the other drenched in so much feedback you feel genuinely sorry for the amp it’s going through.

It’s over a minute before they start singing, and when they do it’s echoey, distant, hard to make out the actual words.  This is fine, the lyrics make fuck-all sense (as you might expect from something called Sea Life Sandwich Boy), but the vocal line itself is the most perfect complement to the music underpinning it.

They wrote that song when they were all around 17, the kind of age where you just meet up with your mates and say ‘hey let’s write the best song ever’ and then just do it because you haven’t internalised that you shouldn’t be able to just do that yet.

In case I haven’t yet made this clear: it’s brilliant.  I saw them perform it once, in Paper Dress Vintage, a cupboard above a charity shop near Hackney station.  I still remember the euphoria in the room when those opening chords took off.

And I was pretty convinced, going to this gig, that it wasn’t going to be in the set.

But that’s later.  I get to Islington Assembly Hall expecting to have missed the start of the support band, but someone somewhere messed something up and they don’t come on until half an hour later than advertised.

From 2, when they turn up, are Art.  I’m not sure if it’s Art-Grunge, Art-Folk, Art-Rock or something else, but it’s clearly the ‘art’ part which is important.  They play serious, grown up music for serious, grown up people to nod along appreciatively to.

Artists, doing art.

They have a driving rhythm but a near allergy to anything approaching a melody.  Every song needs to have something in it - a spoken word section, a twangy slide-guitar break.  On one song the rhythm guitarist takes over vocal duties and shouts the last verse into his guitar stock for, I can only assume, reasons.  The set closes with the main vocalist (the drummer, which is cool, you don’t see many of them) holding a note while slapping her throat to create a pitch-wave.

It’s a performance.  I don’t think this band play gigs, I think they have installations.  I spent most of the set feeling like I should be ticking things off on a ‘is this band too pretentious for its own good’ bingo card.

And yet, I’ve got to admit, the crowd seemed to love it.  These guys have a niche, I’m just not in it.

Horsegirl are still so young.  But immediately, when they come on, you can tell they’re just better.

Horsegirl, being better.

The bass and drums were the MVPs of From 2, giving their songs a bit of backbone and direction.  Horsegirl’s drumming just runs, picking you up and dragging you with it.  They don’t even have a bass guitar on stage, Gigi’s being the whole rhythm section on her lonesome and she kills it.

Horsegirl’s music is short, snappy and janky, little jumping spiders of songs that move in quick bursts.  Live, they’re still snappy and janky, but the songs extend themselves.  This doesn’t mean they’re long - the whole set of 13-ish songs is barely an hour - but the spaces on the record which have all the instruments they haven’t brought out get filled in with more guitar and drums and the whole thing flows more smoothly.

They also have their moments of Art - a keyboard gets taped down to provide a constant drone background for a new song called B. Face - but it feels like an accent rather than the point.

It’s good.  It’s some of the best indie-rock to come out in the past few years.

But I do miss the band they used to be.

Last year, they released their second album, Phonetics On and On.  It’s a very different beast to their first, Versions Of Modern Performance.  It’s more jangly, less shoegaze.  Overall, it’s a better record - and if the highs, for me, are not as high, that’s just a personal preference.

But Horsegirl are not a band that looks backward.  They’re still in the process of inventing themselves, something they might never stop doing.  They don’t feel like the same band which released Versions of Modern Performance, so they don’t do much from it.  We only get Anti-Glory out of everything they did before 2025, but we get four songs that are completely new.

But that’s who they are.  They don’t perform many of the older songs because they don’t feel like the same band that wrote them.  They didn’t feel like the same band that wrote Sea Life Sandwich Boy and Ballroom Dance Scene even when Versions of Modern Performance came out, so a song which would be the pinnacle of most bands’ careers didn’t even make the album.

There’s a good chance they’ll never play it again, because it’s a song from a band which doesn’t really exist any more.

But if that’s how it is, that’s how it is.  We’ll always have Paper Dress Vintage.