The DIY instinct of feeble little horse

Instead, the Pittsburgh trio surprise-released their third album bitknot with almost no warning. It helps that the record is some of their strongest songwriting to date. It’s a wiry, hook-heavy, digitally-altered collection of songs that actively challenge the systems artists feel pressured to feed into.

While feeble little horse has been in motion since their debut EP modern tourism in 2021, the group are entering a new chapter on their third full-length, with the promotional activity coining this album as “the era of feeble 3.0.” Not that the band is especially interested in keeping up the phrase. When the “3.0” tag comes up in conversation, Sebastian Kinsler, the guitarist of the band who also arranges, produces, and records for the group, immediately shrugs off any grand significance behind it. But even if the number isn’t that deep, bitknot does feel like a meaningful third milestone for the band. It is their third full-length, their first as a three-piece following the departure of founding member Ryan Walchonski, lyrical references to angel numbers as '333' echoes on closing track “DMT”, and it's also the product of three years spent gradually reshaping what feeble little horse can sound like.

Since emerging from Pittsburgh’s DIY scene, the band have built a reputation for music that feels slightly off-kilter, but grounded with their production that carries Lydia Slocum’s fluttering vocals perfectly in the mix. Wiry guitars collapse into noise, and saccharine hooks appear through distortion with sudden clarity. Their second record, Girl with Fish released in 2023, pushed that tension further, turning feeble little horse into one of the most compelling young bands operating in indie rock as they surged their way to Coachella and signed to Saddle Creek Records. bitknot, though, widens the frame with a cohesive and emotionally ambitious sound as the band prepares for their largest international touring run to date.

For vocalist and multimedia artist Lydia Slocum, the story begins earlier than feeble little horse. Before joining the band, she was making music alone under the solo project, kiddie. Growing up in central Pennsylvania, Slocum longed for the band life that she knew was happening elsewhere. “I was mad at my parents because I wished I could leave,” she laughs. “I was like, ‘I can’t be in a band here, I’m gonna get over there somehow.’” kiddie became its own self-contained creative space for Slocum, but it also gave her the confidence to imagine herself in a band and what that may feel like. “It made me realise I could make music,” she says. “I guess it made me brave enough to sing for feeble little horse.”

Kinsler and Slocum soon met through a mutual friend and Slocum felt at home with a band, finally. They first collaborated on kiddie’s “Dog Song (wet jeans)”, eventually leading to “Dog Song 2” on Hayday, one of Slocum’s first appearances in feeble little horse. The vocals extended to 12 tracks across the album and live shows kept pulling the project back together. “Playing DIY venues is what makes us continue to be a band,” Slocum says.

For a group now preparing for expansive touring, their sense of “making it” remains refreshingly skewed. When trying to recall feelings of a breakthrough moment for feeble little horse, it was not a major festival slot or viral moment, but leaving Pittsburgh for the first time to play a tiny DIY show in Philadelphia. “We were still just playing in a back room in a warehouse bar,” Kinsler recalls. “But it felt different. We’re not just playing house parties to our friends anymore.”

Slocum remembers a similar perspective shift around Philadelphia label Julia’s War showing support of the band, credited for propelling Wednesday, MJ Lenderman, Glixen, and MX Lonely, to name a few, and initially released their debut album before Saddle Creek became their label home.

“Someone was interviewing us and saying, ‘People think you’re gonna make it big,’” she says. “And I was like, ‘This is making it big.’ We just played Julia’s War Fest. That’s it. We already did it.” Kinsler adds, “With Saddle Creek as well, they understood us,” he says. “They understood our influences. They gave us a fair deal. They didn’t ask for creative input.”

That autonomy remains central to how feeble little horse creatively functions. Slocum handles the visual world-building of the project, from the music videos to the whimsical, earth-toned album artwork for every release, and designs their own merch (in addition to other artists like Asheville band, Wednesday). Meanwhile, Kinsler shapes much of the production and electronic experimentation. Between them, the band still operates with a DIY instinct that feels increasingly rare, even as their audience grows. “I think we’re just a little bit controlling,” Slocum laughs.  

While the band’s reputation has more commonly been associated with noise rock, Kinsler and Slocum insist they have always been chasing the high of writing the perfect pop song.“We’ve always been giant pop heads trying to make the poppiest records we possibly can,” Kinsler shares. “Every album we just get a little bit better at understanding what ‘catchy’ means.”

The image of feeble little horse pulling apart Top 40 hooks in pursuit of sharpening their melodic instincts makes perfect sense once you hear the record, with a list of reference points including Britney Spears, Ke$ha, MGMT, and Liz Phair. Beneath the disruption, bitknot is full of songs that lodge themselves in your brain almost against your will long after the first listen, in part to the hyperactive digital production and staccato synth stabs that weave throughout. The shift is partly practical, as with Walchonski’s departure, feeble little horse found themselves down a guitarist, forcing Kinsler to pivot how songs came together.

“I can’t write a million guitar parts for every track,” he says. “But I can write one guitar part and one electronic part on the computer.” Slocum and Kinsler had already been writing remotely, accumulating material without necessarily knowing what shape it would take. “We realised we already kind of have half an album,” Slocum says. “We’d just been doing whatever we naturally wanted to do.”

While blown-out guitars still tear through the mix at times, it’s the jagged synth work that leads each song, giving bitknot a pieced-together, scrapbook feel. The warbly opening of “Guts” embraces how playful their music can get, while “Upside Down” doesn’t stray away from hitting hard with dizzying overstimulation. There are many layers to the production that it requires multiple listens to fully absorb its stranger pleasures.

“Shopping” is perhaps the clearest articulation of bitknot where the lyricism reveals more of the album’s laments. Slocum starts to spiral through digital self-comparison: “She’s in my feed / I need her clothes / I need her hair / She’s just like me but prettier and it’s not fair.” It’s a feeling experienced all too well after a late-night of binge-watching reality TV on Bravo or doom scrolling on Instagram, absorbing artificial lives with envy. Likewise, “Dior” transforms jealousy and humiliation into something absurdly catchy to sing along to. Mid-song, Slocum delivers one of bitknot’s most memorable lyrical moments: “I think I dodged a bullet / Not going to Wednesday’s show / Kate saw you and she saw [beep] / But you came for me, I know.”

“For a long time there was no censored beep,” Slocum says, laughing. “It was the actual name of the person.” The inserted censor sound effect,  inspired by Kendrick Lamar’s approach to lyrical omission on good kid, m.A.A.d city, makes the moment even better, transforming personal specificity into a joke everyone can project themselves into.

That elasticity is part of what makes bitknot work so well. Though the album frequently wrestles with capitalism, digital alienation, and hyper-consumption, Slocum never writes from a position of detached personal critique. If anything, the songs feel brutally honest and self-implicating. “A lot of the album was more so just confessing stuff,” she says. “Facing things I don’t want to face. Acknowledging my own role in our system.” At the time, Slocum was finishing university and gravitated towards the political theory of Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man – the 1964 critique of advanced capitalism and mass consumer culture – which inevitably bled into the writing. “I was like, how do I make this about theory somehow? But it’s not just me complaining about my situation. It’s more just facing how I kind of suck,” she nervously laughs.

That tension between sincerity and humour runs throughout feeble little horse’s world naturally. There was, briefly, discussion of naming the album DMT, after its feral closing track. “DMT” is shorthand here not for psychedelia, but “Death Money Tech,” a phrase that neatly captures many of the record’s villains. Before that, Kinsler and Slocum share how working titles apparently included “Streaks”, “Poop” and in what might be the least likely serious contender of the year, “Death Grips Penis,” notably inspired by the explicit cover of the experimental hip hop trio’s 2012 album, No Love Deep Web.

The real creative inspiration struck while recording drums for "Poison". “I was looking at Jake Kelley's [drummer] Slipknot poster,” Slocum says. “And I thought: bitknot. It’s not a word. It doesn’t exist. But it’s our own thing.” Whether or not the lore bears authentic weight, it feels quintessentially feeble little horse. For every critique of alienated consumer culture, there is an offhand joke threatening to destabilise its seriousness. What else is there to do but use humour to cope with the anxieties of the world? Because for all its commentary on digital estrangement, feeble little horse are not interested in becoming austere cultural pessimists. If anything, the record argues for connection, but not the flattened version online spaces may offer. Slocum’s hope is not necessarily that listeners decode bitknot too heavily, but more so that the album nudges people towards something that feels more real. “I’m hoping we can trick people into connecting in other ways,” she says. “Not on Instagram or TikTok. I hate social media so much.” Slocum says plainly.

It makes feeble little horse’s surprise release strategy feel less like an anti-marketing flex and more like a genuine nature of their DIY attitude. Instead of packaging authenticity as content, feeble little horse want the music to simply arrive and collide with the right people. That momentum will carry them to their first-ever live dates in Canada, then across the UK and Europe. Perhaps that is the most revealing thing about feeble little horse right now. For a band that is very clearly on the rise, they still seem far more interested in making strange and emotionally charged records than chasing ambition or success – and yet this may be exactly why it is happening.