FEEBLE LITTLE HORSE - BITKNOT

A project always and simply spurred on by the motivation of being the best band in the world, this collection of 11 songs slowly percolated over the three years that have passed since their acclaimed sophomore album Girl with Fish – a digitally-altered noise rock shockwave that not-so-gently shepherded them everywhere from the arid Coachella Valley to the historic riverbanks of Paris. The class of admirers that this increasingly experimental band continues to generate will surely find respite in the overwhelming squall of guitars throughout bitknot, trademarks of their playful deconstruction of a guitar riff’s traditional contours. However, the album constructs more than a comfortable familiarity – we are squarely in the era of feeble 3.0. Their 2025 single “This Is Real,” the final song written alongside founding member Ryan Walchonski, proved to be a more developmental prophecy than a storybook conclusion – its chameleon-like electronic kinetics and chaotic oscillations between ballad, inside joke, and unrepentant fury masterfully constructed the axes on which their palette could grow, legibly and unrestricted.

Perhaps no track more successfully illustrates this newly evolved plane, nor the thesis of bitknot, than “DMT,” an early album name contender and militant investigation into the harbingers of our late capitalist hell – death, money, and tech. “In a capitalist system, we are separated from where things originate. It's being American and being embarrassed of being American. It's being quietly conditioned and harvested, like walking mouths and wallets.” The irreconciliation of our pure genesis and ugliest interpersonal projections, exacerbated by our culture’s perpetual imposition of hyperindividualism in tandem with the naïveté of our spirit, is abstracted throughout the album to play out all across the spectrum of modern human entanglement. “Shopping” and “Dior,” two album stunners that perfectly and proudly put on display feeble little horse’s twin obelisks of “catchy as fuck” and “loud as fuck,” soothe the open wounds of abandonment and parasocialization with the dependable – 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” deploys a spiritual safeguard that gently suggests you move through the confusion of grief rather than buy your way out of it, slowing the runaway emotional schizophrenia just enough to avoid a total collapse. Platonic, familial, and romantic, same-sex and not, face-to-face or profile-to-profile, relationships snake around the assumed infallibility of religious dedication to those around you and the inevitable fallout of being let down by someone you love – or, perhaps someone you’ve never even met. Despite it all, there is hope amidst the despair of wired connections.