H ere they come now, bustling down the street in Brooklyn, three young musicians wrapped in winter coats and chatting animatedly among themselves as they approach the diner on the corner. It’s a chilly Friday in December, just a couple of degrees above freezing, but that’s nothing for this trio of best friends from Chicago.
“Chicago is a completely different animal,” says singer-guitarist Penelope Lowenstein, 20, as she crowds into a booth beside singer-guitarist Nora Cheng, 21, and drummer Gigi Reece, 22, her bandmates in the resolutely unconventional indie-rock group Horsegirl. “I was having this conversation with my brother. He was like, ‘In Chicago, it’s like you’re traveling from airlock to airlock in the winter.’ It’s like you’re in space or something.”
Lowenstein, Cheng, and Reece have been inseparable since they met in a School of Rock program about six years ago. Two of them are in the middle of exam season at NYU when we meet, but the big event that all three are feeling excited and hopeful about is the Feb. 14 release of Horsegirl’s second album, Phonetics On and On, which they recorded in Chicago a year ago, in January 2024 — “airlock-to-airlock time,” Cheng says.
The magic formula that Horsegirl unlocked as teenagers took effect fast. Within just a few short years, they went from covering Sonic Youth’s “Incinerate” at open mics to featuring two members of Sonic Youth as guest musicians on their critically acclaimed 2022 debut, Versions of Modern Performance, to opening for Wilco and Pavement at sold-out theaters. “It’s really exciting to see that type of post-punk guitar music being reimagined as something that speaks to a different generation,” Jeff Tweedy told Rolling Stone last year, summing up much of Horsegirl’s appeal for Gen X and millennial fans.
For all the success they saw with their first album, though, Horsegirl soon felt eager to move beyond it. “Modern Performance was our high school record, and we knew it when we were making it,” Reece says. “We were straight-up kids.” {read}