One of my favourite albums of all time is Remain in Light by Talking Heads. The album derives its fragmented character above all from the fact that the band, in a sense, sampled itself here: meticulously worked-out loops were transferred into an organic-sounding band context. Everything live – and yet somehow not.
One of my favourite albums of the 2020s so far is Girl with Fish by Feeble Little Horse. On it, the young indie band from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, serve up one of my favourite subgenres with their glitchy shoegaze pop: ultra-catchy rock music that constantly sounds as though it were falling apart.
One of my favourite albums of 2026 is Bitknot, also by Feeble Little Horse. Here, the fundamental aesthetics of Remain in Light and Girl with Fish are, in a sense, fused together. As on the band’s previous explosive work, Bitknot is short, crisp and shaped by ultra-droning guitar chords as well as frontwoman Lydia Slocum’s sober-sweet voice. Beyond that, the group pursues an approach reminiscent of Talking Heads around the time of Remain in Light: it sounds as though recorded performances were being digitally processed, chopped up and put back together – seemingly arbitrary, but in fact with precision. The Digital Audio Workstation functions here like another band member. This principle, however, is not pushed too far; at their core, the pieces remain catchy pop songs with a rock foundation. A digital, accessible storm of samples and guitars.
