Cate Le Bon and Horsegirl

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Cate Le Bon

Its creation led by pure emotion, Cate Le Bon's seventh record Michelangelo Dying usurped the album she thought she was making.

The product of all-consuming heartache, her feelings overrode her reluctance to write an album about love, and in the process became a kind of exorcism.

What emerges is a wonderfully iridescent attempt to photograph a wound before it closes up but which in doing so, picks at it too.

Stalking its maker between Hydra, Cardiff, London and Los Angeles, Michelangelo Dying was, significantly, finished in the Californian desert, the place where much of the record's landscape and heartache exists in her mind.

The scenery's desolation blows through the statement album opener Jerome, all wide open space, elongated enunciations, and the gnomic instruction to gently read my name / cry and find me here / I'm eating rocks.

A record centered on the many states of existence within love and its aftermath, Le Bon found herself surrendering to the abstraction of intense feeling and the grieving of a fantasy.

On Mothers of Riches, a letter delivers something wrong before love and existence fold into nothing, while About Time, with its looping drones and percussive synths, starkly announces I'm not lying in a bed you made.

And perhaps most evocatively of all, the album's centerpiece Is It Worth It (Happy Birthday)? powerfully evokes the simultaneous universality and unknowability of love, and by extension, mortality.

Her admission I thought about your mother / I hope she knew I loved her catches devastatingly in the chest.

Horsegirl

Since their debut release in 2022, much has changed for the band. In the fall of that year, they relocated to New York City, where Penelope and Nora were to attend NYU. It was the first time the trio had written music outside of Penelope's parents' basement. You can hear the push in a new direction by virtue of their new environment, but through this time of unparalleled change, the band turns inward. They write with unanticipated honesty, leading us through scenes of girlhood and youth. Friends gathered around the kitchen table, smiling. Silent walks down cold streets as words freeze in air. Quiet mornings reading in bed with your partner sleeping beside you. The indelible truth is that Horsegirl is a band of best friends; being around them you can see that love in their eyes and it is always a joyous thing to witness.