bitknot by feeble little horse

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.

The energy generated from this fissure between human nature and a culture of convenience, between dirt and digital, creates a new space wherein one can re-imbue a sanctity of interdependence away from consumptive “self-sufficiency” and materialism. “The album art is based on the coincidental core memory matrix, which was used in old computers to store memory / access information using 0s and 1s. Each core, or ‘bit,’ is accessed through the grid of wires, like a knot that stores secret details and memories.” bitknot presupposes that we find new modes of being through this grid, entrusting one another with the construction of these knots. This negotiation with an ever-developing hybrid reality is expertly exemplified in the album’s production – the buoyancy of Kinsler’s arrangements provide a perfectly balanced surface tension for the weight of Slocum’s meandering introspection as they playfully harmonize against saccharine hooks, walls of noise, and some of Kelley’s most laser-focused drums to date to create a sonic chimera that is as likely to be found nascently developing in the early aughts as some unknown, chromatic future. Back-to-back late album highlights “Upside Down” and “Guts” weave through these sounds as methodically as the wiring on the album’s art, dropping a supercharged car battery’s worth of synths and samples in the ocean of their guitar-driven songwriting framework. After all, they’re still a rock band; they’re simply doubling the punch of what is not-so-secretly a pop song, underscoring an Ableton-inflected faith toward synthetic solidarity in the face of the developing complex of online isolation.

Rhymes written with sidewalk chalk that refuse to be washed away in the Anthropocene’s acid rain of destructive relationships, generative magic in the face of destruction, Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man manifest through the spirit of a young woman born and raised in the long shadow of the Steel City’s industrial ghosts, alchemical synthesis and the intensive study of the clumsy conjunction of IRL and WWW – it is within the rhizomes and neural networks of these conflicts, impossible to avoid now, that bitknot proliferates.

pittsburgh guitar music

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