Chasing Fridays: Feeble Little Horse, Gridiron, Glixen live, more

It's hard to have a bad time listening to music during the first week of warm spring weather. It cracked 70 degrees in Pittsburgh this week, and feeling the sun streaming through my office windows made it easier to enjoy most of the music I consumed over the last seven days. I once again kept the mood posi for this edition of Chasing Fridays and plugged some shit that I've been rocking with: the new Horse Vision LP, a fresh Feeble Little Horse chune, Gridiron's latest mega-anthem, and the 2006 Camera Obscura album Let's Get Out of This Country. I also reviewed Glixen's headlining gig in Pittsburgh, which provided an interesting window into how The Kids are interacting with shoegaze in real life.

The Camera Obscura portion of this newsletter is for my new-to-2025 Chasing Fridays segment in which I write about an older record that I've been spending time with. ​​​That section of Chasing Fridays is for paying subscribers only, so you can toss me $5/month to read that and any other paywalled content on my site. I wouldn't be able to dedicate as much time as I do to Chasing Sundays if it weren't for my paying subscribers, so if you like my writing and can afford to support me monetarily, I'd greatly appreciate it.

Horse Vision - "Animal"

I've written about Horse Vision many times over the last six months so I won't belabor the point here, which is that they're one of my favorite new bands in indie-rock. The Stockholm duo's newly-released debut album, Another Life, contains nearly all of the singles they've been dribbling out since 2023, along with a handful of fresh tracks. It's inherently a little clunky as a full statement – more eclectic mixtape than coherent album – but it serves the function it was designed for: to showcase Horse Vision's mystical guitar pop in all its charming forms. My favorite of the newbies is "Animal," a dew-coated bedroom-pop jaunt with Seinfeld bass slaps and blinking synths weaved into a tapestry of Alex G nods. The best Horse Vision tracks are healthily inspired by Alex G's work, but what makes this group more than a bland tribute act is that they have their own uncanny flair. I don't want to exoticize their Swedishness too much, but there's a glint of wintry whimsy in Horse Vision's music that simply doesn't register as American to my yankee ears. In their hands, a somewhat straightforward song like "Animal" sounds a little bit magical.

Feeble Little Horse - "This Is Real"

When I interviewed Feeble Little Horse a few years ago, they told me that the music they were planning to make after their then-unreleased sophomore album, Girl With Fish, was going to have hardcore parts in it. I was perplexed. How was this quixotic bedroom-gaze band going to fold brash screams and heavy riffs into their silly, brittle indie rock? "This Is Real" is a glimpse at what they had in mind. The Pittsburgh band's first single in a couple years has a section in the middle where Lydia Slocum howls like a screamo vocalist over the type of fuzz she'd usually lackadaisically croon into it. It's a strange moment in a song that may well be FLH's weirdest composition yet, but also definitely their most hi-fi recording. It took a few spins to reveal itself to me, but now I'm obsessively zeroed in on the details that have always made this band so interesting.

Sebastian Kinsler's Doris-like auto-tune during the second verse is cool as hell. The fluttery samples at the beginning (and that occasionally pop up throughout) are a nice touch. The warbly acoustic guitars and flittering synths during the song's second half are supple in a way FLH's prickly older music isn't. And then there's the lyric, "I got the anger off my chest/but we'll never be the same again." When I first profiled the group, they were giggling about how several music writers had totally misunderstood the meaning behind Slocum's abstract poetry. So, at risk of falling into that camp myself, it's hard for me to not read that line as a reference to the band's sudden, months-long hiatus after Girl With Fish dropped in 2023. Slocum told me that she began writing FLH lyrics as a way to process relationship rage, so now that she's gotten the anger off her chest, will the band ever be the same again? If "This Is Real" is any indication, then the answer is yes and no. It's different but also definitively Feeble Little Horse.

Gridiron - "Mascot"

Sometimes, my favorite songs are ones that I expected to hate. My love for Gridiron's 2022 album, No Good at Goodbyes, was somewhat unusual because I don't care for Gridiron's primary influence (E-Town Concrete) and am usually turned off by heavy hardcore that's overtly goofy. "Mascot" is goofy as hell. It's a rapcore song that contains the lyric, "you're employee of the month at the bitch store," and a refrain that flips one of their previous sports analogy call-outs ("you on the bench/we in the trench") into a whole new athletic association denigration: "And you ain't even on the bench no more/you're just a mascot." Despite loving the band's previous material, I thought I had had my fill of Gridiron and was ready to turn my nose at them now that they're signed to a well-funded rock label and are making high-budget music videos with rented Rolls Royce's. Alas, I fucking love this shit.

The thing about Gridiron is that if another group of musicians attempted this sound, it would likely fail miserably. However, since Gridiron are basically a supergroup of some of the greatest, most prolific musicians in contemporary hardcore – their other bands include Never Ending Game, Scarab, Blistered, Envision, Simulakra, and literally dozens of others – they're able to pull this off without coming across as gimmicky sellouts. Instrumentally, "Mascot" is a well-oiled machine of Slayer licks, Cold World DJ scratches, and pummeling mosh parts. But it's vocalist Matt Karl who shines brightest here. Since No Good At Goodbyes, his rap flow has gotten tighter, his punchlines have gotten funnier, and his melodic abilities have increased, as demonstrated in the middle of the hook when his voice rises an octave to break out of his predictable vocal pattern and grant "Mascot" a radio-tier catchiness. Again, that's a dangerous gambit for a hardcore band, but Gridiron are masters of tip-toeing up to the shark's pool, dangling over the edge, taunting the beast to its face – but never jumping that motherfucker.

Glixen, Suzy Clue, She's Green @ Bottlerocket Social Hall

I've been writing a lot about Glixen lately since they're one of the buzzier bands in shoegaze right now, and because I find it interesting how polarizing they are. When I profiled them for Stereogum last month, the comment section was rife with people gawking at their Y2K rocker aesthetic and dismissing Glixen's music as rote and boring. People also seem to have a bone to pick with the band's live show. When I saw them at Slide Away festival last year, I thought their gushing waterfall of sound was amazingly powerful, but many other internet voices attest that they've been shoddy on the touring circuit and can sometimes have an off-night. Maybe so, but not in Pittsburgh this past Tuesday.

Their headliner at the 200-cap Bottlerocket venue drew a healthy 100-plus patrons, mostly early 20-somethings decked out in baggy pants, raccoon scene hair, visible whale tails, and other artifacts of the mid-2000s fashion scene. There was one dude in an Affliction tee who looked like Jimbo Jones from the Simpsons, and another guy rocking an Evanescence shirt. If nu-metal and shoegaze tied the knot in 2024, then 2025 seems to be the year butt-rock joins the polycule. One of Glixen's opening tourmates, Suzy Clue, played a couple songs that overtly sounded like Flyleaf and System of a Down, and a bunch more that sounded like Jack Off Jill with a bit more reverb. At one point, every head in the room was bobbing to a riff that might as well have been plucked from a Breaking Benjamin album – and this was 30 minutes after She's Green lulled the crowd into a stupor with a fine selection of Slowdive-ian shoegaze.

Any of the head-cocking contradictions between the two openers melted away once Glixen took the stage. This band just have it down pat. The rhythm section was locked in, the guitars roared, and singer Aislinn Ritchie's vocals were leveled perfectly in the mix so that each line landed like a warm and tingly icy hot patch. I've seen a lot of hype about She's Green this year, and while I thought their set had some very intriguing moments, they didn't bring the wind-knocking "it" factor that Glixen did. It was Esteban Santana's guitarwork that really shook me. Every time I glanced in his direction he was either bent at a 90 degree angle over his pedalboard like a possessed shoegaze demon, or coolly standing there while he yanked the whammy bar to produce a torrent of moaning glide-guitar noise.

Glixen are often accused of having more style than substance, but I don't know how anyone could honestly say that after watching them do the thing in real-time. "Sick Silent" and "Splendor" are two of the finest shoegaze songs this decade, and watching the room break into a mosh pit frenzy for their last few tracks, including the wall-shaking instrumental closer "Shut Me Down," was a joy to witness. Their set contained some awkwardly long tuning breaks and stilted banter, but that's to be expected for a shoegaze band. What's important is that the songs sounded brilliant. Between the sinewy recordings on the Quiet Pleasures EP and the way Glixen perform those tracks live, I'm convinced that the skeptics littering their comment sections are totally off-base and willfully misinterpreting the sounds emitting from Glixen's amps. They're a great shoegaze band. To me, that point is un-controversially obvious.

Subscribe to Chasing Sundays for $5/month to continue reading the final segment of each Chasing Fridays column, where I go in on an older record that I've recently been spending time with.

Camera Obscura - Let's Get Out of This Country