Feeble Little Horse leans into digital weirdness on bitknot

From the opening moments of bitknot , it’s obvious that Feeble Little Horse has found an entirely new gear. Where on Girl with Fish the blown-out textures were more ’90s indie rock and shoegaze, on their latest LP, there’s a more modern edge to the distortion and the riffs cut cleaner. Similarly, where the digital glitchiness was mostly relegated to window dressing on their sophomore record, on bitknot it’s integral to the arrangements and a core part of their emerging, distinct sound. We got a preview of this new direction on the one-off single, and one of my favorite songs of 2025, “ This Is Real .” It blended blast beats, Sonic Youth-esque guitar melodies, pitch-shifted vocals, and glitchy samples. It even briefly lets the metronome click bleed into the track. It’s a three-minute chaotic tour de force that needs to be heard. Bitknot reins in the scatterbrained tendencies and turns the thesis of “This Is Real” into something more approachable and sustainable over the length of a 25-minute LP. The opener, “Doorway,” starts with a wail of feedback and a pummeling series of guitar stabs before settling into a melodic microloop of synths and vocals over a programmed drumbeat. It drifts back to the big drum hits and fuzzy guitars for the chorus, gradually adding elements before collapsing into an outro of beat repeats and vocal stutters. It’s more “restrained hyperpop” than “maximalist indie rock” by the end. “Rewind” relishes in its cheesy synths. …