“Perfect,” they say.
They recently moved in with their fellow band members — singer-guitarists Penelope Lowenstein and Nora Cheng — and the trio is still getting familiar with the space.
“I've been thinking a lot about furniture and ways to arrange a very tiny room that you might have in Brooklyn,” Reece says. “And I think that I'm coming to realizations about my sensibilities in a space.”
This sentiment helps you learn a lot about Reece: They’re deeply thoughtful about even the seemingly little things, and they spend a lot of time trying to understand themselves and the world around them.
Reece, Lowenstein and Cheng formed the indie rock group Horsegirl as teenagers in Chicago in 2019, where they met in a School of Rock program. Their first album, 2022’s Versions of Modern Performance, was revered by everyone from Rolling Stone to Gorilla vs. Bear, putting them on the list of celebrated indie bands you either know or pretend to know. Now they’re back with a new record, Phonetics On and On, and they’ll return to Dallas for a show at Sons of Hermann Hall, where they played just a few years ago.
The show will be quite different, though.
While Versions of Modern Performance was loud, propulsive and, in Reece’s words, “very dancey,” the band’s new record is calmer, subdued, even soothing. The Guardian calls the record “a minimalist indiepop masterpiece” while also pointing out that the group’s “chaotic carapace of distortion and dynamics” is a vehicle for “soft-centred pop and bruised melodies,” a tongue-twisting description that actually makes sense if you think about it. It helps to listen to the record, too.
On "Where'd You Go?", calm strumming crescendos into a frantic electric guitar solo.
The subtly catchy melody of "Rock City" is as close to a guaranteed earworm as you can get, but at the climax, the song suddenly shifts, becoming something else entirely, even if only briefly.
In other words, bursts of the first record pop up here and there, but there are clear signs of the band settling into a subtler sound as you would a new home. It’s similar to what you might’ve heard from a pop-rock group from the UK in the late '70s or early '80s, which perhaps explains why they have a strong enough following to support a recent European leg of their tour.
“We're a lot more focused on the intimacy of a space and trying to feel like the audience is really listening to us and responding to what we're playing,” Reece says. “To kind of strip things back in the way that we have, we just couldn't have done without making our first record.”
Reece says the band wanted their first album and the accompanying shows “to feel really huge.”
That urge to create explosive moments is still there, but the drummer now feels the band “can create these big, meaningful moments with less.”
Part of that realization, Reece says, is about “getting older.” They may all be in their early 20s, but they’ve been creating together for the better part of a decade. In that time, they’ve grown a lot and learned a lot about each other and themselves. And they’re still learning.
"We’re really watching ourselves grow inside of this band and inside of touring and inside of the projects we work on together,” Reece says. “This phase of us touring feels very related to the age that we're at.”
They later add, "As we three collaborate more and more, we're finding more and uncovering more about what it is we like to make together and what a collaboration between us three is."
Horsegirl’s lyrics are often cryptic; they seem to dance around lofty topics like loneliness, friendship, love and connection, while the layered, mile-a-minute instrumentation does most of the talking. On the new record, songs like “Well I Know You’re Shy” give the lyrics their time in the spotlight, leading to messages like this:
“Well, I know you're shy / If you listen to me, you'll know / I wanna say, ‘Hi,’ in your window.”
It’s similar in tone to “2468,” which sounds like a childhood rhyme adopted for adults who love indie pop because, in a sense, that’s exactly what it is.
Lowenstein told NPR that the idea for the song began with the band thinking about what a little girl would sing to herself walking down the street. Then, they turned that into “a really playful rock song.”
“It was more about that kind of playful spirit than it is about anything,” Lowenstein told the radio station. “And repetition — how when something is repetitive, little changes become so powerful.”
Thanks to songs like that, the album feels like an exercise in fun even when it veers towards melancholia. That’s likely because, for their second record, “we really gave into the intimacy of a friendship as close as ours,” Reece says.
"I feel a responsibility to Penelope and Nora, to hold up my life, because I have these people around me that I care about so much,” they say. "I've learned the most I could possibly learn about connecting with other people through the friendship I have with Penelope and Nora."
Now that they’ve moved into the same Brooklyn apartment, the band has more time to watch TV and movies together. A recent favorite is Broad City, the New York-based Comedy Central show about two friends in their 20s. Ilana Glazer is the high-energy, happy-go-lucky friend who’s never shy about her love for her more straight-laced friend, Abbi.
This begs the question: Since Horsegirl is a group of friends living in the same city, who is Ilana, and who is Abbi?
Reece has some thoughts.
“I think that I kind of have that Ilana attitude where I'm like, ‘Let's get out there, let's do something crazy.’ And I'm very effusive about my love for them in a way where I'm like, ‘You guys are my best friends ever and I could cry right now. I love you so much.’”
But on any given day, one of them could fill the opposite role: One may be the comedic straight man, while the other is ready to take on the world.
“And I feel like that's kind of the beauty of Broad City, too,” Reece says.
It works because they can switch roles. It works because they know each other so well.
Horsegirl will perform on Friday, Aug. 8, at 7 p.m. at Sons of Hermann Hall, 3414 Elm Street. Tickets are available starting at $28.70 on axs.com.
