If you’ve spent any meaningful amount of time lurking around London’s DIY underground over the last year, chances are you’ve heard somebody mention The Healing Power of Horses in the slightly evangelical tone usually reserved for bands that seem to materialise out of nowhere and immediately feel essential.
The East Anglian duo make music that sounds like it’s been beamed in from a mouldy attic at four in the morning after too much caffeine, too little sunlight, and a prolonged fixation on beauty, grief, and digital decay. Which is more or less exactly what happened. By their own admission, they’ve spent “way too much time in the attic making tunes and not enough time outside,” emerging pale, bug-eyed and gloriously detached from any obvious genre affiliation.
That refusal to fit neatly anywhere is precisely what makes them so compelling.
Last month, The Healing Power of Horses announced themselves properly with “i wait, i sink”, a debut single released through section1—the Los Angeles-based sister label to Partisan Records that has become a home for artists operating slightly outside the usual indie-rock coordinates. The track quickly picked up momentum, earning Track of the Week accolades from Loud & Quiet and BBC 6 Music‘s Introducing Mixtape, while drawing attention from The Line of Best Fit, So Young, DIY and CLASH.
Now they’re following it with news of their debut EP, Summer Indoors (or outside wearing black), arriving July 17 via section1.
The title alone feels like a complete worldview. Equal parts self-deprecation, romantic melancholy and accidental dress code, it perfectly captures the atmosphere running through the record. Across four tracks, guitars blur into blown-out textures, rhythms crackle and collapse, and melodies drift through the haze like half-remembered conversations. It’s music that feels both intimate and impossible to fully grasp, constantly slipping between comfort and unease.
Alongside the EP announcement comes new single “In Yr Right Hand Reveal Heaven”, a song that somehow manages to sound simultaneously heartbroken and celestial. The band describe its origins in typically enigmatic fashion:
“IYRH is music from the castle of heaven, cool and warm. there was a first half written – ground floor tenement glasgow, end of winter – during a riper year of understanding. then the saddest thing ever happened to us and we wrote the second half and glued it together in East Anglian Attic sticky dawn skies big angel. first ☆☆☆ then ♥️♥️♥️. we love you anyway. t&c”
The statement raises more questions than it answers, which feels entirely appropriate. The Healing Power of Horses are not especially interested in explaining themselves. Instead, they deal in feeling: moments of transcendence hidden inside distortion, tiny flashes of hope buried beneath anxiety, melodies that seem to arrive from somewhere just beyond the edge of the room.
For now, those moments are beginning to migrate from the attic into real life. Following a run of increasingly talked-about performances around London and a recent appearance at The Great Escape in Brighton, the duo are set to play section1’s fifth birthday celebration at Club Cheek in London on June 11, supporting RIP Magic. The show sold out almost immediately. Later this year they’ll head to France for Pitchfork Paris, taking place between November 5 and 7, marking another step outward for a project that until recently felt like one of the UK’s best-kept secrets.
Not bad for a band whose entire aesthetic appears to be staying indoors.
Summer Indoors (or outside wearing black) lands July 17 via section1.
Live
June 11 — London, UK — Club Cheek (section1 & Perfectly Imperfect 5th Birthday, supporting RIP Magic) SOLD OUT
November 5–7 — Paris, France — Pitchfork Paris
Summer Indoors (or outside wearing black)
- i wait, i sink
- So-Perfect (Combing)
- TOURNIQUET
- In Yr Right Hand Reveal Heaven
words Al Woods
