HorsegiirL is opening for Robyn tonight (Oct. 2) at the Kia Forum in Los Angeles, but if she’s nervous or even antsy to get to the venue, she doesn’t let on.
Instead, the German producer projects a sort of grounded calm when we meet at noon on a sunny patio in downtown Los Angeles. Here, the sound of a jackhammer pulverizing some nearby concrete functions as a sort of equal and opposite reaction to both her vibe and the body of work she’s most recently released, her June debut Nature Is Healing.
Celestial and sincere but also often unhinged (listen for the cameo from The Doctor in the album’s “An Apple a Day”), the album helped cement HorsegiirL’s status as a key of-the-moment dance star with strong pop girl (or pop horse) tendencies. These exist in both the structures of her music and the fantastical world building achieved through presenting herself as a stylish equine named Stella Stallion that exists in a natural wonderland world that’s like if Lisa Frank met Planet Earth. This persona isn’t a gimmick, but a fully realized artistic universe, with its own internal logic and a hyperpop-meets-pop-meets-hardcore-dance soundtrack that HorsegiirL has been carving out since her come-up through the Berlin rave scene, which she broke out of with her 2023 single “My Barn, My Rules.”
Planet HorsegiirL has its own gravitational pull. In preparation for this story, I’m sent a folder of images of Stella Stallion with a bevy of other pop girls/peers: Sabrina Carpenter, Grimes, Cobrah, Zara Larsson, Kim Petras, North West. (There are also shots of her with actors Adam Scott and Lisa Rinna.) In April, she made cameos during the Coachella performances of English rock darlings Wet Leg and British dance pop star PinkPantheress, moments that followed her own 2025 Coachella debut.
“A major shift was when I played Coachella last year,” Stallion says when contemplating her breakthrough. “I’d played Portola the year prior and that was already a big moment, and I think those two festivals plus what came after was a slow and steady growth.” She says her U.S. audience is now the biggest of anywhere in the world.
Many of these fans will see HorsegiirL on her North American headlining tour, which started Sept. 19 in Denver and gallops along through mid-November before heading to Europe. (Her routine for staying a healthy horse on the road: exercise, abstaining from alcohol and up to 10 hours of sleep a night. “I don’t care if people judge me for it, because I need the sleep,” she says.)
The tour comes towards the end of a year that started, as HorsegiirL recalls, with the first time she ever really felt like she belonged in the U.S. music scene. “It was during Grammy weekend,” she says. “There was this Spotify event I went to where it was like, ‘Wow! I don’t feel like an imposter all of a sudden. I have this invite because I’m allowed to be here.'” (Still, when asked if she aspires for Nature Is Healing to get a Grammy nod, she says she’s “not very much of an awards kind of girl,” given that “I don’t really think a Grammy says a lot about the quality of someone’s work.”)
On Oct. 30, HorsegiirL will release Hardcore Healing, a new EP that, as its title suggests, integrates the rave, happy hardcore and gabber sounds that have long been part of her live repertoire and part of her world since she was a kid growing up in the German countryside, surrounded by nature with a geologist mom. The project features collaborations with Parisian gabber star aamourocean, frequent PinkPantheress collaborator Count Baldor and HorsegiirL’s own frequent collaborators Free Jimi and Luvhunter. Released this week, the project’s lead single “c*ntry girl rock” is a collaboration with cool guy producer Dylan Brady that fuses hardcore and country into a song that’s wildly catchy, kind of strange and quintessentially HorsegiirL.
Here, Stallion talks about healing, the pop path and what it means to be a horse.
You just started your first North American headlining tour. What’s the show like?
The show is very theatrical. I’m dancing, I’m singing, and I have moments behind the decks, so it’s really a new chapter and a great mixture. I feel both like old HorsegiirL and this new pop girl path I’m on. With Nature is Healing, because it has so many downtempo and vocal heavy tracks, to do the album justice and tour it right, I needed to change the show as well, because it’s not really just a DJ album. It’s also really exciting to not be alone on stage, to have dancers with me, because DJing can be isolating sometimes, especially on big festival stages.
Is that pop girl path something you’ve intentionally been trying to cultivate, or has it just kind of happened?
I was always a bit of a pop girl, because all of my tracks, even from the very early ones like “Harvest Heartbreak,” always had a very classic pop structure in the sense that it’s verse, pre-chorus, chorus. It’s quite hooky. It maybe has pop culture themes, like star signs and whatever. I always leaned into that, but always combined it with quite a fast BPM, which immediately makes it maybe less radio friendly. But it wasn’t a conscious thing for Nature Is Healing. It was just that I had a lot to say, and I couldn’t have fit it into a strictly electronic club record.
Are there elements of the pop path that you’re especially enjoying?
What I really like about pop artists and pop girls specifically is that they can have different eras. I was always fascinated that a lot of pop musicians will reinvent themselves and explore sounds and don’t need to stick to one genre, per se. That is one of the big things I love about pop music. I listen to so many different kinds of music that I always found it very hard to stick to one genre when it comes to my own music. It felt quite restrictive, and I think in pop, people want artists to showcase different interests and inspirations. I really like that about pop. And then the over the top-ness, the theatrics of pop, I find that super cool and interesting and fun.
I wonder if that over the top-ness and theatricality lends itself especially well to how you present yourself to the world, given that you are a horse.
Horses are very over the top. I think that’s why I probably would not want to be like, a minimal techno DJ.
Is there a sort of philosophy behind the way you present yourself?
I think the reason why I’ve been embraced so much, especially in a queer context, is because a lot of people have experienced the confinement of societal boxes. I think everyone yearns for the freedom to just express who you truly are, instead of being prejudged.
Also when you asked me about pop stardom, something I always found really scary is fame to that level, where you cannot leave the house and you cannot ever go back to a normal life where you can actually live and experience things like a normal person. I can only imagine how that feels, and I don’t know if I would ever want to trade my privacy for that.
Does being a horse give you a kind of freedom that a human artist might not have?
Because I’m a horse, I feel like people can also project what they want onto me, whereas a lot of human artists come with a past, they come with class, race, gender, all of these things that in a way immediately determine, or determine to a bigger degree, how they’re placed within the music space and who will even give them a chance and listen to them.
On the music side as well, because I grew up in Germany, I do think a huge part of me is always rebelling against being put into this box for brown horses. Whenever I would tell someone I make music, it’d be like “Oh, do you rap?” or “Do you do R&B?” Hardcore and gabber were very much open spaces, but they’re predominantly white, but it’s also what I grew up with, so I’m reclaiming that a bit.
Horsegiirl Alex LockettRight, so the title of Hardcore Healing is obviously clever given that the project features sounds like gabber and happy hardcore. What ideas are you exploring with the project?
There’s an idea of healing sometimes, especially in Western contexts — and also the understanding of Eastern practices like meditation and yoga that are always supposed to look very calm, as if healing and having a healing practice only needs to look one way — where you arrive at this calm state of just like, constant floating. I don’t feel like that’s the whole process of healing. I feel like healing can also be raging and moving quick, instead of just calmness. I think that’s just as important. I find it very healing to go into a club space and move with a lot of bodies around me and not just this like, super self-focused, self-work, self-individualist idea of healing.
Tell me about making it.
We went to the countryside and locked ourselves in this house for a week and a half and just made a bunch of music. It’s nice to work with people you know. Like, I really enjoy the process a lot more when there’s a friendship established and it’s not this business-esque way of going into a bunch of writing sessions.
Take me through a typical day in the countryside.
Wake up at 10, have breakfast, then start making music ’til we get really hungry around four. Go forage for food, which wasn’t always easy because the next supermarket was like, a 40-minute drive away, then work ’til midnight, then make a fire and roast things on the fire, and then go to bed at three.
How does Hardcore Healing relate to Nature Is Healing?
Nature Is Healing caters to a bit more downtempo, less club sound, and I felt like I wanted to still do something this year that’s more back to my club roots. A little less vocal heavy, faster BPM, still euphoric, still kind of in line sonically, but reinterpreting some of the sounds that I used on Nature Is Healing in a more club setting.
In your recent NME cover story you talked about hardcore and gabber being genres popular among working-class people in Germany, and I wonder if that’s how you were thinking of country music too, in terms of how you fused the two genres on “c*ntry girl rock.”
One hundred percent. I feel like there’s a lot of city girl music and not enough country girl music, and I really think the fusion of hardcore and country has to happen. I’m just getting the ball rolling, starting to get that genre fusion out there with country girls.
I don’t know if I’ve ever heard anything like this song.
In Germany, a lot of country people listen to hardstyle and jumpstyle and stuff, and there’s a German version of country called Schlager. So there’s already this duality, especially if you’re going to a country Octoberfest kind of thing — not the actual Munich one but just a small town one — that there will be country played during the day, and then it kind of goes into harder stuff at night. I can see that working for the U.S. too.
Given all these factors — pop, hardcore, country, healing, nature, club music, etc. — how do you describe the world in which you exist right now? Like, what is the world you’re bringing to life on stage?
I think it’s still quite chaotic, in a weird way. It’s like, nature, chaos, rave. The challenge going into this tour was how I could still provide a really high-energy show without losing fans that come to really dance and shake a–, but also, how can I have these serene moments of singing and really emotional moments? So yeah, nature chaos rave.
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