Once I see the “Sandy Alex G For President” bumper sticker, I do know I’m in the appropriate place.
I tempo alongside the sidewalk, stroll into the driveway, and climb a precarious flight of stairs as much as Feeble Little Horse’s present headquarters in Pittsburgh’s shabby faculty hub of South Oakland. Situated within the crosshairs of beer-caked basement venues previous and current, the residence is, for a school pad, excellently furnished, with framed photos hung thoughtfully on the partitions, snug furnishings, and a heat ambiance. A John F. Kennedy memorial plate is displayed proudly in entrance of the hearth. I ask, however no, it’s not an inside joke associated to the band’s music “Kennedy,” a standout from their 2021 debut full-length, Hayday, which was simply re-released in October upon their signing to indie stalwarts Saddle Creek.
Two members, singer-bassist Lydia Slocum and drummer Jake Kelley, are seated on a sofa beneath the genial glow of a tastefully dim lamp, sipping beers and quietly murmuring whereas guitarist-singer Sebastian Kinsler, who lives there, politely will get me settled right into a lounge chair. They introduce me to guitarist Ryan Walchonski, who’s resting atop the espresso desk, beaming in through Zoom from his spot in DC, the place he’s lived since graduating from the College of Pittsburgh over a yr in the past.
Feeble Little Horse’s breed of shoegazy slowcore is playfully interspersed with giggles, foolish samples, and bits of dialog picked up throughout recording periods and purposefully left in, like flecks of pulp floating in do-it-yourself lemonade. Their vivid personalities and joke-fueled friendship are on full show by the tip of our dialog, however they’re shy and considerably stiff at first. It’s their first-ever sit-down interview, and all through our discuss, it doesn’t appear to have sunk in for them that Feeble Little Horse is a band with, for lack of a greater phrase, clout.
They’ve been praised within the New York Occasions and Pitchfork; Snail Mail, one in every of modern indie-rock’s most adored acts, big-upped them on Instagram; they had been courted by a number of of essentially the most iconic labels in indie music; and for a band who’ve performed lower than 30 exhibits, their streaming numbers reveal that tens of hundreds of individuals already give a fuck. Their shrugging indifference to processing their buzz is smart when you think about their whirlwind timeline. Two years in the past, Feeble Little Horse didn’t even exist.
“Lydia’s been cool since she was like 13,” Kinsler, 20, quips once we’re speaking origins. The opposite three members weren’t. Walchonski, 24, was a John Mayer head in highschool, whereas Kelley, 22, performed in “boomer-rock cowl bands” all through his teenagers. As soon as he turned enlightened in faculty, Walchonski really served because the elder indie sage for his bandmates, introducing Kelley and Kinsler to bands like Duster and Alex G, the kind of stuff Slocum, 21, had been listening to for years.
Previous to Feeble Little Horse, Kinsler and Slocum every had novice solo initiatives that they battle to explain as something aside from “SoundCloud” music. Kinsler acquired into Playboi Carti and Kendrick Lamar on the finish of highschool, deciding he was “carried out enjoying guitar” and started constructing music on the digital manufacturing software program Ableton. Slocum, who didn’t play an instrument earlier than FLH, would make memey, do-it-yourself pop songs on her iPad, throwing her voice over sampled sounds and importing them to SoundCloud moments after their completion. “I by no means thought I’d be in a band,” she says emphatically.
Technically, Feeble Little Horse didn’t start as one. After assembly in faculty, Walchonski and Kinsler (who finally did carry his guitar to high school) joined a short-lived garage-rock band, the place they immediately clicked as co-songwriters and rapidly outpaced their bandmates’ artistic power. They quickly broke off and started engaged on what was initially conceived as a mere studio undertaking, reflecting their new fixation on shoegaze and slowcore.
“We simply had much less buddies,” Kinsler jokes of he and Walchonski’s break from their bandmates. “We’d hang around on Friday nights when the opposite two had been partying and write the songs for [FLH’s debut EP] Trendy Tourism.”
On these late nights, Walchonski’s roommate, Kelley, would get residence from a piece shift to search out the 2 sprawled out in the lounge surrounded by gear and pizza bins. “Hey, do you need to report drums on this music we made right this moment?” they’d ask. So Kelley, jonesing for a brand new undertaking, would leap on his package and bang away proper within the residence nicely past midnight, neighbors be damned.
The writing course of started in February 2021, and by Might, Trendy Tourism was accomplished, fully home-recorded by the band and blended by Kinsler. Earlier than self-releasing it onto streaming providers, they landed on the identify Feeble Little Horse, a fraction Walchonski learn in a e-book and thought sounded adequate for his or her modest new band.
“It was the primary time that I had made one thing I used to be pleased with,” Walchonski enthuses of the EP, which has extra of a post-punk pacing in comparison with Hayday, however lays the groundwork for his or her warped and quirk-filled fuzz-rock. Nonetheless, it’s lacking an important part: Slocum, whose droll deadpan, easy hooks and evocative lyrics — zeroing in on bodily grossities like grinding enamel, picked pores and skin, and vomit — make Hayday such an exhilarating, catchy and fully-realized physique of labor.
Whereas she’s native to Pittsburgh, Slocum research artwork at a small Christian faculty a couple of hours throughout Pennsylvania, however she met the fellows by way of a mutual pal across the time FLH was coming collectively. “I’d joke about being a popstar,” she jests of her low-stakes SoundCloud moniker, Kiddie. “And my dad was like, ‘You simply want a band so you may get out all your analogies and your rage about your boyfriend.’ He was so proper.”
After starting what was initially alleged to be a cut up EP between FLH and Kiddie, the band figured it’d be extra worthwhile to simply invite Slocum to “be an equestrian,” phrasing the provide as such of their group chat. The best way self-reflective metaphors fell out of her aided Kinsler and Walchonski’s painfully sluggish lyrical course of, her voice was completely suited to the songs, and her expertise for visible artwork gave them an in-house designer for canopy artwork, fliers, and merch. Plus, they wanted a heat physique to carry a bass to be able to play exhibits.
“I used to be very humbled as a result of I didn’t know an instrument nicely,” Slocum says of when she was requested to hitch. Per week earlier than their first gig that July, Slocum purchased Walchonski’s bass for $40 and taught herself the instrument by rapidly studying a set’s value of songs.
Feeble Little Horse’s bodily introduction to the world simply so occurred to coincide with the re-introduction of stay music. The undertaking began earlier than vaccines rolled out and the US was nonetheless in lockdown, and whereas many artists felt hindered by these restrictions, FLH are grateful they’d the chance to hone their craft in solitude reasonably than work out the kinks at sloppy stay exhibits. Additionally, they’d no thought the right way to be useful members of an area scene.
“We didn’t know what it was prefer to attempt to be an area DIY band as a result of we by no means skilled it,” Walchonski causes. “So we got here out of this the place no one was doing something and we form of simply did no matter we needed as a result of we didn’t know any higher.”
“It was sick as a result of I wasn’t cool in highschool in any respect, so the primary home present I went to was the one which we performed,” Kinsler beams.
Regardless of their palpable nerves (“I used to be shaking the entire time,” Slocum recollects) and a novice sound one that foolishly drenched your complete combine in reverb, the band’s inaugural gig christened FLH a real-life band, and caught the eye of Connor Murray, who runs the (now-formerly) Pittsburgh-based label Crafted Sounds, an important documentarian of most of the metropolis’s best indie acts lately.
“I hadn’t heard music much like theirs in Pittsburgh,” Murray says, recalling that preliminary present throughout a separate interview. He was particularly drawn to Slocum and Kinsler’s vocal chemistry, and the best way they pulled off “glitchy-sounding” guitar tones in a cramped basement setting. “The children in Oakland cherished it, which you additionally like to see. All inexperienced flags to me.”
For Slocum, the gig was additionally a private flex. “There have been ladies that had been imply to me in our choir who got here to the present, and so they didn’t know that I used to be gonna be there,” she remembers. “They usually had been like, ‘It’s so cool to see you on this setting.’ I used to be like, ‘Yeah bitch, you need to’ve been good to me.’”
Crafted Sounds finally re-issued Trendy Tourism in early 2022, however by that point, FLH had already launched Hayday many months prior (through the Philly-based Julia’s Warfare). To make clear how briskly shit moved, the band had begun writing Hayday’s materials earlier than Trendy Tourism was even out, and after enjoying a sum complete of two exhibits that summer season, they rocked their third gig to have a good time Hayday’s launch in October 2021. It was a double-victory lap for the band. Not solely did they’ve an outstanding debut album out, they had been additionally not planning to interrupt up.
“I used to be shifting and we had been just about beneath the impression that issues had been gonna be coming to a detailed,” Walchonski recollects of the time main as much as Hayday’s completion. “Lydia got here in, we recorded Hayday, and it form of breathed new life into the band. I used to be so pleased with Hayday and what all of us contributed to it that I didn’t need to quit, I don’t suppose anybody else actually did.”
Ending it there would’ve been a travesty. The songs on Hayday had been an infinite leap ahead that bottled the magical potion of fluid chemistry, sharp artistic instincts, and the spontaneous joys of home-recording with your mates. Kinsler left the mic sizzling in between takes, pulling snippets like Slocum studying, “sorry,” aloud whereas texting and shaping it right into a punctuated one-liner throughout “Chores,” a slap-happy rocker that seems like an alternate world the place Pavement reduce their enamel opening for Blue Smiley. The plodding “Tips” and the cross-faded “Drama Queen” every erupt into gushes of ear-drowning shoegaze guitars, however the album’s vary extends to waltzing slowcore (“Image”), blown-out pop (“Kennedy”), and even dreary balladry (“Too A lot”). “Did I do it an excessive amount of?/ An excessive amount of/ Did I need her an excessive amount of?/ An excessive amount of,” Kinsler dwells through the 45-second nugget of anxious remorse, channeling Alex G each sonically and in its keyhole take a look at a spiraling narrator.
Kinsler’s bevvy of samples (lots of them eliminated for copyright causes within the newly-released Saddle Creek model) and Slocum’s flippant humor (“I acquired you all dolled up, sporting my Christmas present/ However you look dumb as fuck,” she jabs at her ex’s new beau in “Chores”) make their “web music” savviness — honed by way of an appreciation of hyperpop, lure and tongue-in-cheek pop — a part of FLH’s vigorous persona. It’s a digital-soaked aptitude and not-so-serious vibe that situates them in an rising wave of shoegaze bands alongside Wednesday, They Are Gutting A Physique Of Water, Hotline TNT, A Nation Western, and Full Physique 2, all of whom FLH reference as influences, and (nearly) all of whom are primarily based throughout Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.
