The centaur of attention: horsegiirL is captivating clubland

"I hope I'm making sense!” says a half-human, half-horse who is currently one of the most sought-after DJs in the world. If you can read that sentence without feeling like you’ve slipped through a psychedelic wormhole, then you’re no doubt familiar with horsegiirL, the Berlin-based artist whose wet ‘n’ wild mix of Eurodance, happy hardcore, gabber and trance and outlandish imagination has made her a phenomenon among a generation of ravers thirsting for a larger-than-life approach to sound and style. If you’re scratching your head, then a whole world of discovery awaits.

The Chinese zodiac says we have to wait until 2026, but in the dance music world, it feels like the last few years have all been the Year of the Horse. Mixmag named her as a DJ who defined 2023, heralding her as a figurehead for a clubland movement blending mainstream and once-niche sonics with eccentric presentation, feeding a post-lockdown hunger for high BPMs and dancefloor euphoria, while rejecting the Berlin scene’s hard-coded seriousness in favour of a soft-lensed, pop-princess aesthetic fantasy.

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HorsegiirL’s swift rise has all happened under the guise of her elaborate horse mask with a crafted backstory to boot, but her cutesy foray into the uncanny inspires strong reactions on either end of the scale. Her diehard fans, known as “farmies”, love her for her barnyard-themed world, couture outfits and how both her sets and tracks balance intensity with pop sensibilities. They idolise her and the world she inhabits as though they want to live there themselves, and dress colourfully and on-brand - fluffy cowboy hats, pitchforks, hand fans - in the hopes of doing so for just an hour or so at her shows.

Detractors see her as a fresh low for club music - a distinctly post-internet gimmick whose popularity signifies a crisis in a culture that's straying too far from its roots. That hasn’t stopped her touring the globe in 2024, as we were exposed to more of horsegiirL’s world: pumping Eurodance north of 160 BPM via hyperpop’s synthetic vocal treatment, with saturated melodies encrusted with diamante shine around goliath kicks that hit like a haymaker.

Until now, she’s been so insistent on the character that even her farmies swear by her horse identity. Speaking to her over Zoom, she will often revolve answers back to life as a horse. But she is also eloquent and whimsical, particularly about cultivating and preserving community through partying and in nature in equal parts. She’s able to phrase beliefs that come from and concern the animal kingdom, but are tactfully worded to apply to many aspects of club culture from safe spaces to feeling isolated from nightlife.

Parody is entwined in the horsegiirL lore. Its construction mimics the manufactured backstories of a certain era of teen pop stardom from the 2000s, particularly the country-girl-in-the-city duality of Disney’s Hannah Montana. The story goes that she was born and raised in Sunshine Farms to a human father and horse-human mother, always feeling the heat of the spotlight, performing country music around the animal kingdom before her career crossed over into the human world after being discovered by Whitney Horseton. Placed against the pumping dance sounds of her contemporary work, which were popular just a few years before the height of Disney popstars and peak tabloid scandals of the mid-to-late ’00s, it collapses the noughties into one moodboard, and tees up a satire of pop stardom that has continued with paparazzi pics, gossip mag covers and plastic surgery rumours.

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What does ring as reality in horsegiirL’s backstory is that she was raised a multi-instrumentalist in jazz bands and classical orchestras, but the music she gravitated towards was less studied. “I loved fast, hard, happy, euphoric music from all the CDs that my cousins would burn for me,” she remembers. “I didn’t really have a concept of genres, I just loved how euphoric it made me feel. I think I always had a double life happening,” she posits, practically winking to the sentiment of ‘Best Of Both Worlds’ by Miley Cyrus’ alter ego.

Beyond bootleg CDs, her musical hand-me-downs were chart compilations like Top of the Pops and Bravo Hits, the latter of which became inundated with Eurodance and happy hardcore in the mid-'90s. She was buying music as early as seven, always taking home cheap maxi-singles which were the popular format for trance and Eurodance in Germany in the '90s and '00s. This led to horsegiirL continuing to explore hardstyle, mákina, jumpstyle and the Melbourne shuffle of the mid-2000s all from the humdrum countryside. In a sense, Sunshine Farms represents the hometown of every kid who grows up in what felt like the middle of nowhere, consuming cultures from far away, wishing to one day be amongst it.

horsegiirL took up DJing after recognising her talents as an aux-cord selector, and her early mixes found her tapping into a scene of SoundCloud pop edits from producers who bear the same influences as her. Initially, she soldered these sounds together with regional shades of US East Coast club music: Miami bass, Jersey and Baltimore club and ghetto house. “I love Jersey club, Baltimore club, ghetto house and ghettotech,” she lists in her German twang. “I love the rap and generally vocal-heavy element to it, also the silliness to some of the choices in the drum loops and stuff that you use for it. It’s also a genre that doesn’t necessarily take itself too seriously,” she explains.

Mixes like 2020’s ‘Ponyhof Vol 1’ (German for “Pony Farm”) and 2021’s ‘speedy stutentreff’ (“Mare Meeting”) communicate what she loves about the styles perfectly. Strings of MCs rap about 25 lighters on their dresser, big booty bitches and sucking toes amongst pop hooks of the last 30 years and horse whinnies laid amongst the fray as though she is waking up the stables.

Since then, she has transitioned into full Eurodance thrills after wanting to restructure her mixes to have the biggest builds and drops she could. “I’m not a big EDM girlie, but I do love that release feeling of a drop, and I do feel that that’s missing from a pure Baltimore or ghetto house set,” she explains, giggling as she thinks. “I think it draws a very different crowd when I just do ghettotech, it tends to be not as completely lose-your-shit type energy. People are a bit more composed, it’s seemingly a bit more about seeming cool, maybe that’s my perspective on it. Plus, it’s hard to make a mix where you have Baltimore club and then go into a crazy sped-up anime nightcore track,” she laughs.

Once horsegiirL started DJing publicly, her ascent was blindingly fast. 2022 saw her first viral moment with a HÖR Berlin set - just her second-ever public performance. Catching attention initially due to the sheer weirdness of a centaur casually mixing, she played back-to-back edits that smashed together happy hardcore, techno, Baltimore, booty bass and juke, all with bright synths.

Cue her even more-viral Boiler Room a few months later where, dressed in a deranged-looking wig and sleeve socks, she leant even further into Eurodance euphoria for a veritable hoedown throwdown. It was the most vivid insight into her personality, at once an It Girl lip syncing to pop and grabbing onto her white headphones like they’re the latest accessory to have, but when she plays a ghettotech edit of DMX’s ‘Party Up’, she poses and jumps around like tumbleweed in a twister. When a hard beat takes its foot off the pedal for a few seconds, she looks into the camera like it’s a bathroom mirror, checking her hair and make-up, tapping into a level of performance that felt pre-ordained to catch attention for better or worse.

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Sure enough, it did. The set received strong, divided reactions at the time, with comment sections either glowing with heart emojis and superlative adjectives, or flat-out rejecting it and calling it nonsense. One comment read, “what a mockery of dance music’s efforts to be taken as a serious genre of music”, as if it were all designed to fit in the Tate Modern as opposed to, say, a dancefloor.

It’s not like electronic music has been lacking DJs who wear extravagant masks before now. The majority of these have been men, whose concealed identity tends to evoke mystery and allure. The wielding of anonymity by horsegiirL, a Black woman beneath the mask, arguably has more subversive undertones, in an industry in which misogynoir is a factor. The insidiousness of condemning women for how they look is levelled at an absurdist equine image, in turn reflecting its irrationality. At the same time, horsegiirL’s moves in the fashion world, modelling for Ottolinger and DJing for Marc Jacobs, distort an industry notorious for strict, often discriminatory, beauty standards.

Ultimately, though, horsegiirL’s persona is a playful one. What it does best is represent truth about Eurodance, hardstyle and other styles of this intensity - it’s unsubtle, delirious fun. Why wouldn’t you want a half-human, half-horse at centre of it all? With a lifelong passion for these sounds and strong world-building, she has recontextualised these genres - some that were subjected to years of derision - for a new generation, many of whom may have never come across it before. “People reframe a lot of genres now,” she says. “There is a certain snobby attitude, or used to be, in dance culture about which genres are the ‘good’ ones, the ‘proper’ ones, and which aren’t. I think that’s all being reassessed, people just love to have a good time and they aren’t as genre-dictated. They’re not gonna dissect it and think, ‘I’m not gonna dance to donk!’. They just want to be taken on a journey and have a good time.”

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It’s awakening an exciting new wave of club music inspired by a turbulent patchwork of donk, mákina, Scouse house, hardstyle and gabber. It can be found in the productions and setlists of artists as wide-ranging as Somniac One, 100 Gecs, Two Shell and Lobsta B, as well as labels like weird nxc and Belters, and broadcast platform BOG Bristol. These sounds have all remained popular among the communities that first popularised them, and horsegiirL sees a working-class connection between English donk, mákina and Scouse house, and European hardstyle and gabber. “These genres like donk and mákina were around for over 20 years and now they are having a renaissance in the SoundCloud bubble,” she says, her voice growing with excitement. “That’s amazing because it was the same with hardstyle and gabber,” pronounced like “Hubba Bubba”, “in that they used to be working class styles. No “serious” DJ would play these styles, they were the little man’s music, the countryside style of music. And now it’s being more incorporated on big stages, being played by mainstream DJs and mainstream festivals.” There is a danger that this popularity could gentrify these genres, with big DJs capitalising on the sounds while leaving the original pioneers behind. Artists with the following of horsegiirL have the platform to uplift others and educate audiences on those origins. Her more lucid moments of real-world commentary suggest she doesn’t approve of exploitation of the working classes, having previously named Margaret Thatcher and Elon Musk among her nightmare blunt rotation. Politically speaking, she expresses capitalism-sceptic views and a hope that humankind can one day achieve a natural harmony. “Karl Marx had a deeply positive view of human nature, to assume that if you equalise everything and remove the incentive to become rich, that humans will be helpful to each other,” she lets out a sigh. “I love that idea that humans really are like that, but then again…”, she tails off, gesturing broadly at everything.

Berlin is one of the elite clubbing cities, but it’s a city where silliness is viewed with hesitancy. After moving to German capital in 2022, horsegiirL quickly found strength in numbers, being taken under the wing of Live From Earth, whose roster includes MCR-T, Brutalismus 3000, DJ Gigola and more. Founded in 2014 as a left-wing YouTube channel documenting antifascist demonstrations in Germany, the staunchly-DIY collective evolved into a label that disrupts the po-faced reputation of Berlin’s nightlife scene by folding influences from pop and hip hop to gabber and trance, as well as humorous lyrics, into their at-times feverish techno. The label took a chance on horsegiirL from the very beginning, helping her create the zany music videos that fuelled her rise. A visually-elaborate b2b set with MCR-T for Mixmag in the summer of 2023 unfolds with the narrative richness of a short film, vividly bringing Sunshine Farms to life. “Live From Earth showed me that even in a big city with commercial and greedy motives that there’s still this grassroots movement going on,” she says, full of hope. “You don’t need to subscribe to this idea that you can only do something cool if you have a massive budget or the right connections. Sometimes, all it takes is friends coming together and helping each other and using their resources.”

horsegiirL’s music carries wide-eyed optimism with such unflinching conviction that it can help you see the wood for the trees. The beats throw her delicate voice through what feels like gale force winds, but it’s still apparent that love in all forms is at the top of the menu, oftentimes in the midst of a utopian party. “Welcome to the happy land / My barn, filled with all my friends / The grass is so green / There’s so much to see”, she sings with an American drawl on ‘Green Grass (Intro)’. She still injects the melancholy that completes the Eurodance recipe, such as on her first song 'Harvest Heartbreak', where small things that are now gone, like being fed carrots by her lover, mark a relationship’s dissolution. Sometimes she signs songs off with cheeky innuendo, like riding bareback on ‘Saddle’.

horsegiirL isn’t the first animal to cross over into the human world creating bubblegum beats. The 2000s spawned a chart-climbing phenomena unique to the decade in that their spread was through a mixture of early-internet popularity and custom ringtones. Characters like Crazy Frog, Schnuffel Bunny and Hampton the Hamster all became hugely popular ringtones with Eurodance sweetness pairing with their often-nonsensical vocals. horsegiirL is fascinated by this unique convergence of novelty marketing, new technologies and en-vogue pop. “They opened the door for more animals to have a career in pop and electronic music fields,” she professes. “It works, Eurodance and flip phones. It was that futurist, modernist promise that there was this there is this big, shiny, glitzy future and we are all these super tech-savvy people with our flip phones and our cool ringtones that we spend five Euros on.”

Many of horsegiirL’s farmies are younger Gen Z who just missed out on experiencing the mania of this era perpetuated by German company Jamba (FKA Jamba!, AKA Jamster). They don’t remember the fine details of Crazy Frog’s saturation through advertising, the public’s irritation with his chipmunked voice. They only know the character and his ‘Axel F’ theme song that became the third best-selling single in the UK in 2005. horsegiirL is bringing back another element of the 2000s to match her sound, but this doesn’t read as parody, rather an earnest harnessing of the feeling of the promise it carried. Where original ringtone mascots only existed in CGI, she is a half-human entity that you can rave alongside.

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The Y2K revival at large has been linked to “nowstalgia”, defined as “the impulse to return to an imagined past by those who never experienced it in the first place”. The theory goes that Gen Z are drawn to Millennium era aesthetics as an idealised time of prosperity and optimism, repressing anxieties from the steady grind of societal crises that have defined their own formative years. HorsegiirL turbocharges this phenomenon, the ecstatic sounds of clubland classix are plundered and repackaged within a TikTok-friendly fantasy world where the sun shines and the beats bang all day long. She allows youthful audiences to indulge in escapist fantasies and find like-minded connections through dress-up or dance trends, such as the ‘shoulder injury dance’ which powered ‘My Barn, My Rules’ to viral fame a full year after its release. And in a time of a loneliness epidemic and mass surveillance (largely from peers on mobile phones), they can bring these connections into the real world at her shows, dancing with abandon among friends wearing OTT farm ‘fits, knowing that no one is judging them. The large proportion of queer people among her fanbase, who horsegiirL has credited as a major part of her success, also feels like a reflection of an artist whose persona inspires freedom of expression and identifying as whoever you want to be, despite the furrowed brows of those with more closed minds.

Lately she's been leaving K holes in her wake with festival appearances galore in America, Australia and the recent Hayfever tour in Europe, but she expresses how difficult of a sudden change to her life the success and constant travel has caused. “It’s quite demanding, especially if you don’t have any rituals and know what you need to enjoy it, not just getting the job done,” she explains. “On one hand I was very grateful and excited, but I also felt quite isolated and burnt-out”.

Her new EP ‘v.i.p. (very important pony)’ sees her making sense of it while on the road, by taking confidence from her achievements and indulging in a glamorous, materialistic lifestyle for the fun of it. ‘giirL math’ speeds up a deep house bounce into a shoplifting anthem recorded with PC Music popstar Namasenda in snowy Stockholm, while opener ‘materiaL hor$e’ switches through drum patterns like she’s trying on a wardrobe of clothes, accessorised by shrapnels of texture that evokes SOPHIE’s plastic world. The back half of the EP features more sentimental cuts that stick closer to one style, like the crunched hardstyle of ‘bby luv x3’ or the cinematic drum ‘n’ bass of ‘scene before the kiss xoxo’ which makes the titular snog feel like it’s happening while the sprinklers are going off in the club.

Though she is quick to say she is “cosplaying” a personality in the EP’s most materialistic moments, the glamour carries into how she presents herself visually. Inspired by the entangled body poses of ancient Hindu figurines, she doused herself completely in gold in the cover art for preceding single ‘take it offff’, looking like an artefact pried from a temple, and this motif carries over into the EP’s artwork. “Kurt Johnson, who did the cover, does a lot of special effects makeup and crazy transformations himself, and he assured me that the gold paint would be super quick to get off. I ended up being gold for like a good week!” she laughs. “I had gold coming off of places I never thought gold could come from!”

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‘eat, sleep, slay, repeat’ (with the last word stylised as this emoji) has the sort of sizzling bass and meltdown-alarm synths that could have been ripped straight off a Thunderdome compilation, and horsegiirL adopts the language and confidence from ball and drag culture. “‘eat, sleep, slay, repeat' is a very cunty ode to self-love and expression, and who does that better than the ballroom scene?” she explains. “I think consciously and subconsciously, that has become my language. I guess it’s always who you surround yourself with and what you consume. [I love how it] celebrates uniqueness and uplifts the extra-ness of expressing that self-love to the max with different forms of movement and clothing. To become oneself, but also to channel someone else. How powerful that can be to escape one’s confinements as a human being and just be someone else.” Suddenly, the reason for the horsegiirL character’s existence starts to make a little more sense.

The speculation around her true identity seems less important as time goes on, with her fans actively dissuading talk on the subject online. Right now, she is focused on grand ideas to bring the human and natural world together. As a resident of Sunshine Farms, she hears music in nature where others may not, and she describes how she would love to throw musical get-togethers - not just raves - in and amongst nature so that humans can hear it too.

“It would be cool to have an interspecies music festival that looks at different creators of sound, not just from a human perspective, touching on birds and other animals that are composers,” she ruminates, stroking her hair. “It’s kind of a new concept to some human beings that birds are composers. So many animals use rhythmic variations, changing of pitch and changing of combination of notes in order to have a unique melody to communicate, but also to express oneself. It’s not just to find another bird, and birds sing completely differently when they’re by themselves which sometimes have even more beautiful and intricate melodies.”

As much as she is fascinated by the idea of an interspecies music festival, she delivers another one of her bewildering answers that means something greater than the animal kingdom phrasing, this time alluding to the importance of community preservation. “From an animal’s perspective, there’s always a danger that you’re bringing humans into a safe space for the rest of the animals, and it’s gonna be trampling down the grass and leaving trash behind and just the noise pollution. But if there can be a respectful way of interacting with each other, then it’s a great idea to have more music events in nature.”

Are there any sounds in nature that rival the hard kicks that she loves in her music? “Things breaking, volcanoes erupting, ice caps crashing and falling into the ocean… anything with rocks. Roaring of any kind of predatory animal can be very intense. I’d be interested in making a techno track made entirely out of nature sounds,” she ponders. “Because that’s why techno was born, in a way, to create sounds you can’t really find in nature.” Good thing, then, that she’s got one world at her hooves, and another at her disposal.

'v.i.p (very important pony)' is out on January 24, pre-order it here

Nathan Evans is a freelance music journalist, follow him on Twitter