The Pittsburgh trio’s long-awaited follow-up to 2023’s Girl with Fish lands today, with a Button Factory headline announced for November.
feeble little horse, the Pittsburgh three-piece of Sebastian Kinsler, Lydia Slocum and Jake Kelley, will play Dublin’s Button Factory on Thursday November 19th.
The show is announced alongside the release this Friday of their third album bitknot, the long-awaited follow-up to 2023’s breakthrough Girl with Fish, which I featured in brief back then.
bitknot was written, arranged, produced and recorded by the band themselves across their respective homes in Pittsburgh. As ever with feeble little horse, the production is almost as much the subject as the songs are. The album is conceptually built around the core memory matrix used in early computers, where information was stored as 0s and 1s via a literal grid of wires, each intersection a knot of memory. The cover art is drawn from those grids, and the record asks, as the band put it, that we re-knot ourselves together against the slow erosion of meaning that comes from a culture of frictionless convenience.
That sounds heady, and the band’s own write-up genuinely is, leaning on Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man and the spectre of the Steel City’s industrial ghosts. In the songs themselves, though, it lands as something more felt than theorised. Kinsler’s arrangements stay buoyant under the weight of Slocum’s wandering introspection, with harmonies brushing up against saccharine hooks, walls of noise, supercharged synth flourishes and samples dropped into the band’s guitar-led framework, and some of the most precise drumming of Kelley’s career. It is a record that could just as easily sit in the early ’00s as in some chromatic, half-imagined future.
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feeble little horse play Button Factory, Dublin on Thursday November 19th 2026. Doors 7:30pm. Tickets €23.90 plus fees from Ticketmaster.ie. bitknot is out Friday May 29th.
Niall Byrne is the founder of the most-influential Irish music site Nialler9, where he has been writing about music since 2005. He is the co-host of the Nialler9 Podcast and has written for the Irish Times, Irish Independent, Sunday Times, Totally Dublin, Cara Magazine, Red Bull and more. Niall is a DJ, co-founder of Lumo Club, event curator, Indie Sleaze club promoter, and producer of gigs and monthly listening parties & events in Dublin.
