Two Albums with Horses

 

There’s a great deal of comparative and reciprocal artwork that naturally relates to Amando Chapa and Laura Carlisle’s credit for Shallowater’s 2025 God’s Gonna Give You A Million Dollars. Starting with Viktor Vasnetsov’s 1879 painting, The Knight at the Crossroads, a reasonable extension of this line of thought would be to Nikolai Ovchinnikov’s Bogatyr at the Cross Roads, painted nearly exactly one hundred years later. Take this further, even to Einar Baldvin’s 2025 ink on paper Black Knights. Shallowater describe themselves as from ‘where the dust bowl never died,’ and it’s not hard to hear this in the sound of their debut album. You can understand the horse on the cover — you may question its visage, or its imposing avoidance, but the connection between sound and geography can be a familiar recognition.

For another album from the same year, the horse is an interjecting figure. Oslo’s Honnigbarna is vivacious on the cover of Soft Spot. It’s as hard punk as you’re gonna get. We see detail, at about the same scale as God’s Gonna Give You a Million Dollars, but we see life first and foremost. There’s a guy. He’s smoking. There’s a horse. It sees us. What comparison is there for Annika Linn Verdal Homme’s artwork? Whatever it is, I can’t tell you. I know it’s going to hurt, I know no-one gets out alive. Maybe it’s Perseus and Andromeda by Maximilian Pirner. Maybe you could fucking figure it out for yourself.

 The equine framing, the scale of time between their release, and the personal relationship I have found within both texts invites comparison naturally. The question here is why the horse, and what relationship do these two albums have to each other. Neither of these two albums are works that are obviously or lyrically interested in horses. Animalism as a visual language has cropped up in both discographies. Both cross through into realms of colour. Both are mounted. They can look at each other, or they can face away, depending on how you want to line them up. Both cast a shadow. Both exist as extensions of the same medium, but changing, breaking, moving through. These are both transitional animals in how each album presents them. 

 

 

         God’s Gonna Give You a Million Dollars (occasionally abbreviated to ‘Million Dollars’ hereon, occasionally titled in full) is shaped by transitory phases. Each track reads as warped, sun-bleached and losing its form. This is ‘Raw West Texas dirtcore,’ brother, You’re gonna stay to hear it through. When listening to God’s Gonna Give You a Million Dollars , I find I can hear myself breathe. There’s space given for the listener in a lot of these tracks. It is elected and also reduced to noise when decided. It is an album that comes in and out of sleep, but never dulls you, the listener. 

Highway details this balance with a slightness and accordance for this space between the listener, the speaker, and the song. Lyrically, details are lost but never mystified, often finding us as distant or forgotten. There is a known distance between the narrator colloquially hearing that ‘you found a place’, but the space is kept uncertain, so far removed from all known experience it becomes ‘further than you and I had ever been.’ There’s no personal record of knowing where we are. 

There is a continuous textual adjacency here, a displacement of what all that is known into a hazy and unclear rendition, until all colours are gradient. Some details are known, and almost-ontological. We have a ‘worst enemy’, we ‘know that you meant it’, we keep ‘an eye on the door’. Even here, our phrasing is relative without any real attachment to actuality. The song circles around placehood, slowly and delicately, arriving nearer but ending up between ‘up back at the place where the flowers grow brittle’, and travelling further to ‘the congregation’. We’re left with a proper noun, ‘Be Thou My Vision’, but even this is warped into the multimodal terrain of shifting, ‘singing … out of tune’. 

This is not an absurd, meaningless text, but one that uses an obscure, blurred lens as a methodology for letting go. There are ‘lights on a highway’. They only look like this ‘to you’ though. 

Even the art becomes this: two white horses passing through each other, glowing, angelic in their motion. These two have no relation to the horse on our album cover. These two are white, shining, undetailed and passing. The transitory self is bifurcated, almost bright white medium between Soft Spot and Million Dollars. That would be too easy, too concrete. You’re not supposed to breathe that loudly, or speak so confidently to any of these pieces. Shallowater wants you to be going, constantly leaving, and going only to look back. The dust never settles, but it holds a weight that you can’t get off. It stains your clothes. It changes how the light sees you. The dust takes, and what’s left is on the record. 

Homme has involved the visual language of animism twice in her artwork for Honnigbarna, overtly with 2021’s Animorphs, and recursively in 2025’s Soft Spot. Sonically, both albums have a brothership in their presentation. Both albums deal in aggressive and visceral and compressive music, music where you shouldn’t hear yourself think. These are albums, but especially Soft Spot, that only want you to ground yourself in the interchange between tracks. Even then, you’re pressed for time. We’ve got somewhere to go. You’re not getting there fast enough. You don’t behave like you care. It’s escalating, it’s paceless, it’s relentless. It’s the sinew in your arms beginning to give while you hang from the monkey bars. We see the horse is in motion, and so it strikes separation exactly, fully, loudly.

So, Soft Spot is as ambiguous as either of us are illiterate. Sure, you question the ground you stand on. What will bring happiness? ‘A dishwasher? … A future?’ It doesn’t matter. You’ll get to 70 and still find ‘the narrative of my life, a sort of coherent character arc’ will leave you in a state of certainty: I still don't understand what the fuck he is talking about. There is change here. There always is. This is a warping between what is known by way of what is lived, and what is unknown, by way of the future, The future is spoken about as true. We are ‘i skuddlinja mellom liv og død’. Nice. 

There’s a lot of concession in the opening track of Soft Spot. Mistakes are litigated, and presented with a clarity. ‘Sorry for det [...] Hvorfor i det hele tatt si det?’ in present participle ages. Sure, you can read Alt går over, noe varer as a balancing between states of becoming, of growing older and knowing more what the younger self wanted. The track closes out with a thanks. You can also tell yourself to fuck off, fuck up, get over it, get on with it, Festen som aldri stopper. The penumbra of the eye meets the viewer. Are you looking? Or are you watching? This is the world. Are you going to be a part of it? 

We have our lucky mediums. Even the riders on both albums are seen between states -- between the world of texture, the world of worlds, location, nature, and the world of colour. Both horses bear their riders, though we don’t know their relationship. Soft Spot’s passenger rears the horse with a cigarette, somehow kept on the side of his mouth. We can assume a confidence. His balance is impeccable, but his horse is in motion. It is rising, front hooves lifted. There’s a small blur as the horse reels off its front and begins to buck its weight. Neither will be here for very long. Both know each other enough to pass the ride comfortably, to be safe, but the shifting makes the image become kinetic. The shift in form is knowable to the eye. This betweenness becomes them. The rider is holding on, but he won’t need to forever. The horse is rising, but the horse will return to the ground. We don’t need to see it, but this is a concrete world with concrete rules. We can trust the certainty of Soft Spot’s texture. 

 

 Occasionally, you can hold a horse. I found this one while between the house and the shops. My partner was on her way to the doctors. I knew it was getting late. I knew I didn't have long left from the evening, before I'd have to sleep, and let the cycle reset. I had to carry the horse home. 

This horse is an extract from George Stubbs' painting of Whistlejacket, a racehorse. Whistlejacket can see you from great distances still as you navigate the wings and folds of the National Gallery.   

One rider is holding on: the same cannot be said for Million Dollars. We have instead a passenger. He is a passenger because the horse casts more life into the image than him. He is only known by what remains, and the arrows decorating and included within his shadow. His betweenness has been much more punishing. The arrows are angular. The passenger is hooded and except for his horse, alone. His horse has been unscathed, as far as we can tell. The blows have been devastating. There is nothing left of him (notably, he’s been ungendered. I’m making this shit up as I go) as he moves from his tapestry to the sheer red. He’s hunched forward, but holding himself up. We do not see the battle, nor do we see his survival. There is only the wound that has left him, and his horse, as these mottled and stony figures cut between all colour. 

The horse is stood. It’s head is dipped, hanging low, but turning. If we trust this figure to be a horse, then the horse must be looking at us. We can return the look, we can try and meet the eye, but the best we’ll be able to do is to guess. This is where my trust lies. If you shine a light towards this horse, there may be nothing that looks back. 

Neither horse makes full eye contact with us, but both postures could be read as returning a look. Soft Spot’s eye is placed upon us, the thin sclera putting the orbit downwards, finding us. To meet the horse by the eye, we are only able to look up at it. Million Dollars is so much more anonymous. The neck is drooped. All details are implied by a texture, granular and noisy. This is how you are going to die. You have sustained the wound, now you must carry it. You have lived this life as a tapestry, now you must let death into it, a bleak, bright red death. 

Soft Spot comes first. I come across it on a list. It becomes the only thing I listen to for eight months of the year. I was playing a lot of Yu-Gi-Oh!. I’ve spoken about this album at length. It’s silly. It’s shaken something at the top and bottom of my spine. It’s clicked something in my brain. ‘Æ’æ 55 og endelig tar æ Honningbarnatattis.’ 

God’s Gonna Give You a Million Dollars comes second. We had just moved to another part of town. It was getting colder, and we couldn’t figure out how to turn on the heating. I was getting sick, in my own precarious ways, and I found great comfort in it. I knew its sound. It is a tender album. I start to finish every conversation, email and passing exchange with ‘all my love.’ These are the only words that have ever mattered to me. I want you to know this about me. When I die, sooner or later, by purposeful suicide or beautiful incident, please please please please know that I give you all my love, that I have dispersed it through my soul, and that I’m just a body now. 

The horse can be seen as redundant in a world with automobiles. This is stupid. 

The horse is still the carrier, it is the bringer, it is the way, it is the path. The horse is not a justicar, but a deliverer of actuality. In motion, or death, you are between. You are dislocated from absolutes, and instead in an unknown locale between the two. There are no landmarks to guide you, no bearings to angle yourself on. You are drawn to the horse because the horse is your guide here, tethered but omni-directional. You know the horse because the horse also knows fear. The horse has seen itself replicated, remade, reformed. The horse has seen itself killed in a needless accident. The horse is bound to its form by its fear. This does not keep it from living. 

The horse is the method of living. The horse will not carry you across the threshold between the world and into noise. You have to do that part yourself. The horse may watch you, or the horse will watch you, but either way, you must make the decision yourself.

You can press your hand to it. Like you, it can learn to trust. Like you, it can hold itself with grace, and clarity, and exactness. Like you, the horse is gendered. Your relationship to the horse is also gendered. Like you, you are impartial to these conclusions. They describe bodies and forms. You are an animal made of skin. The horse is greater than you by height, pace, and strength, but like you, it has learned that its body is a vehicle for betrayal. 

The nature of this text is, in its analysis, form and sorry excuse for structure, looks at a transitory medium. This is art for an album. I am listening, and I am looking. I am searching, and I am hearing. The mode of the art appreciates accompaniment. Even then, I’m taking in a screen. I’ve turned on the night light on my laptop because my eyes are getting more sensitive to bright white light. I have this document zoomed out by 50%, with the other half of the screen being taken up by the lyrics to All My Love by Shallowater. Creep by Radiohead is on the ‘you might also like tab’, and I’m feeling, frankly, nauseous. 

I’m telling you this because I want to, so I’m writing it. I’m telling you this, because I want to write more. I’m telling you this because I can’t put it into words. 

Both horses seek to break through, though both are equally bound to their staticity. There is a way of seeing the horse as the medium, as the mechanism by which to transgress between what you are, and what you wish to become. You are always becoming something strict, something definable by hexcode, by eye, by way of contrast. You will always be coming from a place, a felt texture, something that you’ve ridden through. This is the horse: you are just the accompaniment. 

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Quickly, a couple additional points of reference are worth mentioning, namely Roksana Bajda’s 2026 oil on linen painting, Herd. Available here. Too, both Horse and Horse interlude from Patron Saint’s The world is against you got me thinking about these two albums again, as a near actual-blend estimation of Soft Spot and Million Dollars. Available here. There’s an anthropomorphism theme I wanted to touch on but I can’t bare the thought of overstaying for another second. Available here. I need to write another essay, something meaningful and dedicatedly better than this. Something about this. Available here.