HorsegiirL
Let’s just say horsegiirL is not your typical up-and-coming DJ bio. She performs behind a full horse-head mask, keeps her real identity under wraps, and leans hard into a bit — she’s described herself as half-horse, half-human — that’s equal parts joke and genuinely infectious dance music. And here’s the thing: the music holds up on its own, mask or no mask.
Her sound is a genre blender set to high: happy hardcore, hardstyle, gabber, futurepop, synth-pop, and eurotrance all get thrown into the same track, which critics have summed up as “yeehaw-meets-hardstyle.” It sounds like it shouldn’t work, and then it does, loudly, at 170 BPM.
She started putting out music in 2022 with tracks like “Harvest Heartbreak” (featuring Baugruppe90) and the Farm Fantasies EP with MCR-T, followed by “Pegasus” that December. But the real breakout came with “My Barn My Rules,” re-released in January 2023, which turned into a legitimate viral hit on TikTok and landed on Dazed’s list of the 20 best tracks of that year. She followed it up with “F0rbiidden L0ve$tory” in late 2023 and “Obsessed” in April 2024, the latter produced by A.G. Cook — a co-sign that says a lot about where she sits in the underground-meets-pop conversation.
horsegiirL’s rise hasn’t been without noise, literally — a 2023 BBC Radio 1 segment touching on “My Barn My Rules” led to an on-air clash between presenters Arielle Free and Charlie Hedges that ended with Free getting pulled off air, which somehow only added to the legend. Along the way she’s played Boiler Room sets in Mexico City and at Calgary’s Badlands festival, building a devoted fanbase who call themselves “farmies.”
Signed to Three Six Zero, horsegiirL leveled up further by linking with RCA Records for her debut album, Nature Is Healing, which NME reviewed as delivering “divine equine dance bangers that balance humour with heart.” It’s the clearest sign yet that what started as a costume and a bit has turned into a real artistic project — one that’s just as comfortable messing with genre conventions as it is packing dancefloors.
