Feeble Little Horse | Hus 7

Artist: feeble little horse Date: Thursday 12 November Venue: Hus 7 Doors: 19.00 Live from: 20.00 Age restriction: 18+ / 13+ accompanied by a parent or guardian feeble little horse are proud to present their third full-length album, bitknot.

The album was written, arranged, produced and recorded by Sebastian Kinsler, Lydia Slocum and Jake Kelley in their respective homes in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

All artwork was designed by Lydia, all tracks were mixed by Sebastian, and the final masters were completed by Heba Kadry with assistance from Jacob Clements.

A project always driven by the simple ambition to be the best band in the world – this collection of 11 tracks slowly took shape over the three years since their acclaimed second album Girl with Fish – a digitally manipulated noise rock shockwave that took them everywhere from the arid Coachella Valley to the historic riverbanks of Paris.

The admirers this increasingly experimental band continues to attract will undoubtedly find comfort in the overwhelming guitar chaos throughout bitknot, a hallmark of their playful deconstruction of the guitar riff’s traditional forms.

But the album is built on more than just a familiar feeling – we are now firmly in the feeble 3.0 era.

Their 2025 single, “This Is Real”, the last song written with founding member Ryan Walchonski, proved to be more of an evolving prophecy than a fairy-tale ending – its chameleon-like electronic energy and chaotic shifts between ballad, in-joke and uncompromising rage masterfully established the axes around which their musical palette could expand, distinctly and without limits.

Perhaps no song illustrates this new level of development – or the very thesis behind bitknot – better than “DMT”, an early contender for the album title and a militant examination of the harbingers of our late-capitalist hellscape: death, money and technology. “In a capitalist system, we are separated from the origins of things.

It’s about being American and being ashamed of being American.

It’s about being quietly programmed and exploited, like walking mouths and wallets.” The incompatibility between our pure origins and our ugliest interpersonal projections – amplified by culture’s constant imposition of hyperindividualism combined with our spiritual naivety – is abstracted throughout the album and plays out across the full spectrum of modern human relationships. “Shopping” and “Dior”, two of the album’s most striking songs, which perfectly and proudly display feeble little horse’s twin obelisks of “catchy as fuck” and “loud as fuck”, soothe the open wounds of abandonment and parasocialisation with the reliable – and reasonably priced! – balm of retail therapy. “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.” Meanwhile, “Cradle” draws on a spiritual shelter that gently suggests working through the confusion of grief rather than trying to buy your way out of it, slowing the runaway emotional schizophrenia just enough to avoid total collapse.

Platonic, familial and romantic relationships – same-sex and otherwise, face to face or profile to profile – wind around the assumed infallibility of religious devotion to other people and the inevitable breakdown when you are let down by someone you love – or perhaps someone you have never even met.

Despite everything, there is hope amid the despair of connected relationships.

The energy generated in the rift between human nature and convenience culture, between earth and the digital, creates a new space in which to restore a sense of sacredness to interdependence, beyond consumption-driven “self-sufficiency” and materialism. “The album cover is based on the random core memory matrix, which was used in older computers to store memory and access information through ones and zeroes.

Each core, or ‘bit’, is accessed through a network of wires – like a knot storing secret details and memories.” bitknot presupposes that we find new ways of existing through this network, where we are entrusted to one another to construct these knots.

This negotiation with a constantly evolving hybrid reality is masterfully exemplified in the album’s production – Kinsler’s arrangements provide a perfectly balanced surface for the weight of Slocum’s wandering introspection, as they playfully harmonise against sugary hooks, walls of noise and some of Kelley’s most focused drumming to date to create a sonic chimera that could just as easily have begun evolving in the early 2000s as in some unknown, chromatic future.

Late-album highlights “Upside Down” and “Guts” weave through these sounds as methodically as the wires on the album cover, unleashing a supercharged car battery of synths and samples into the sea of their guitar-driven songwriting.

Because, after all, they are still a rock band; they simply double the power of what is essentially a pop song and underscore a...