feeble little horse, bitknot

On bitknot, feeble little horse converts what’s been, historically, a kind of hardened laptop twee into something new, confident, and legitimately different. This album sees them shape torqued walls of emotion and sound into a driving, dynamic kind of self-presence operating in a field of illusions. It’s great. 

Whether we’d choose to start at the self-assured sing-talking "Doorway", which surfs a brain-tingling wave of guitar static into a revolving door of bitrate samples, or more conventional fare like "Dior", whose call-and-response metronomic chugging brings us to a prog plateau at its close, we come to the same end. There’s a palpable aliveness to these songs which previous albums somehow avoid acknowledging fully. And a concise, direct spirit driving the lyricism only adds to this.

Which is not to say that, similarly to previous projects like 2023’s Girl with Fish, we don’t see signature FLH choices woven into the album - songs across this project are routinely suspended in a tractor beam and sucked into hypnotic, jangling alcoves, like the bare, determined stretches of "Poison", or the sparkling pitched-up innocence which structures "Rewind". But there’s something underneath this album, and I’m not sure if it’s a fidelity to feeling or just the self-confidence that naturally comes from excelling at a form. Regardless of the source, it creates something mesmerizing. 

The sparse synth tone which threads the eye of "Shady" is incredibly emotionally impactful, and I’m tempted to look at it as the emotional center of the album’s balance beam. Soft regret, resolution, a sort of artful acknowledgment of circumstance are all contained in probably the simplest melody on this project. This tumbles us into the red dark fire of "Dior", “this is my favorite song, but I don’t know the ending” opens up a space for revelation, but we’re never fully directed towards a way out (beyond a compressed Godspeed You! Black Emperor micro-breakdown courtesy of Kinsler and Walchonski) before we immediately swap into "Paris’s" gentle, almost Zen delusion. "Cradle" highlights something which I had probably unconsciously peeped about FLH but never fully surfaced - namely the strong anchoring of their lyrics into the mundane, everyday drama of human life. Interpersonal slights, a sudden noticing of patterns of behavior, a mismatch between want and result, all come across like the motion of celestial bodies, described with a certainty that comes across as patient but final. "Cradle’s" riffs, which intensify and then gently fade back under an astonished “the way you do that”, start to make this impossible to ignore. The song turns a background hum which texturally resembles something like wind-chimes in rain into a lowered-eyelid smile surety. Maybe it’s locked up in “this house will never change because God already came”.

Which takes us to "Upside Down", a shimmering monument to something unclear - definitely reminiscent of hyperpop sensibilities like mixed matches, but directionally pointing to something true, and pixelated, and beautiful. Bigger, on the whole, than the rest of the album, and while usually this would be a source of friction it comes across as more of a capstone. So much so that, as we come to album-closer "DMT’s" angel numbers induced schizoid collapse (“I’m tuned to a key, and I’m so lucky cause It’s all for me”), we almost forget that we were given a glimpse of a transcendent object of some kind just a second ago. Or maybe that was an illusion too.

'bitknot' was released May 26th, 2026, via Saddle Creek