Why Horses? turn birthday blues into liberating art rock with “Yr Big Day”

Why Horses? has a way of putting you into a cold war with yourself, and then daring to swoop in and play the diplomat. Their 2025 debut EP, Yeah, Hi?, has the wispy cerebralism and restrained physicality to conjure the frustration of attempting to float outside of your body, and only being reminded of your own boney bridles in the process. Even lyrically, it concerns itself both with sticks and stones (“I’ve got a fever / I’m burning so hot”), and the words that, unfortunately, very much hurt them, (“I never knew / Your words could cut / And now we’re stuck”).

Still, it carries its burdens throughout with more of a stoic integrity than Why Horses? ever fully gives themselves credit for. In doing so, it encourages the listener to set themselves free from their own follies and internal struggles in its honest steeling against absurdity.

Built around the resolution that, while life is rarely ever just as you’d like it to be, we still have the choice to enjoy it. It's a theme which finds a fitting crux in crying on one’s birthday. “Yr Big Day” finds the band leaning into their capacity to sit with paradox more directly than perhaps ever before. Les Davies, on bass and backing vocals, speaks on the muscular instrumentation: “It’s got really aggressive guitars; when people say it doesn’t sound like a Why Horses? song, we don’t really know how to take it”. He later describes the tone of the guitar as “horrible, but really cool.”

Why Horses? further pushed against their usual go-tos in post-production, adding synths to a track that had initially been the more traditional guitar, bass and drums affair. Davies calls the synth, the “underdog of the song”.

Gabriel Austin Lester, lead singer and guitarist of the band, expresses a similar interest in the song’s asymmetry with the rest of their catalogue. “Our songs usually gradually start, but this song feels like it goes 100% straight away,” he says. Elaborating on their custom of restraint: “We pretty much hold back on everything. We could do everything more or less, but I’m like ‘no’. Obviously sometimes something else will feel like fate, or we really like a part, but everything feels very metered. We don’t want it to be very heavy music; we all like rock music to some extent, but we don’t really like loud music.”

“We’ve got friends in another Cardiff band called Spirited Followers, and they just play the same thing over and over and really draw it out,” he adds. “It’s really cool because it’s immersive, but so different to us. We’ve done a collaborative song with them, and it was so interesting because it was extremely indulgent in itself. There was very little, ‘we’ve got to stop here.’”

The metered precision of their approach to structure implies a certain stubbornness or conviction, almost like it’s coming from a band that is one of their own influences. “I feel like most of the scene in London has so many different genres, [coming from Cardiff] gave us the freedom to sound more like ourselves,” Davies concedes. This freedom, of course, giving room to figure out what “sounding like themselves” actually means.

“I was quite inspired by Young Marble Giants and bands from the 80s. They really influenced my bass playing,” says Davies. “Also The Stranglers, who really aren’t that cool of a band. I feel like his guitar was almost Midwest emo. I think there was a crash of stuff coming together, and we try to make it work.”

On the evolution of his craft since the band formed, “I was doing more chords-y stuff when I started, but I go through different phases where I’m like, ‘There has to be a riff, because a riff is going to catch someone’s ear’”, says Lester. “If you listen to a lot of the songs, they’re based off the riff line. I want an earworm to always be in your head when I’m listening. My lyrics are more spoken word and meandering, and they’re not always ones to sing along to, so I like there to be some kind of riff in there. As someone who has always liked poetry, “I run these charity gig nights and I get poets to perform alongside bands. I feel like that’s always been a big part of my life, so maybe that’s where it comes from.”

Why Horses? are open-minded enough to eke out a strange joy from birthday suffering, but self-aware enough not to exploit the catharsis of crying forever. “We’re not planning to write another ‘Yr Big Day’, but some of its moods will definitely be in future songs”, affirms Gabriel. “It is a bit dramatic; hyperbolic. It’s meant to be a little angry, but also a little cathartic”.