Anti-glory

Some songs open an album by clearing their throat. Anti-glory opens Horsegirl's debut by walking straight into the room already moving, a twanging guitar figure and a heavy, bulging beat that sound half improvised and fully assured.^[4] It is the first thing most listeners heard from the band's first album, and it announces a stance before it announces a story: this is music for people who would rather be in the crowd than above it.

That stance is the real subject of the song. The title is a puzzle, and the band has not, in anything I could find, explained it. What can be said is that the song pairs a grave, frustrated mood in its verses with a chorus that turns toward dancing,^[5] and that the whole record around it is built on friendship, scene and shared effort rather than stardom.

Three teenagers, one scene

Horsegirl formed in Chicago in 2019 and consist of Nora Cheng and Penelope Lowenstein, who share guitar and vocals, and drummer Gigi Reece.^[2] They met around the ages of 15 and 16 through the city's youth-run arts world, where, as Reece puts it, nearly everyone plays music or makes zines, and where Cheng's mother drove them to shows.^[3]

Their first self-released song, Forecast, arrived in 2019, followed by the 2020 EP Ballroom Dance Scene. A bidding war ended with a signing to Matador in 2021.^[2][3] Reece has said that they only ever expected to play for friends and never imagined a full album.^[3]

That modest starting point matters for reading the song. Versions of Modern Performance was written while the members were still in high school and recorded in the summer of 2021 at Electrical Audio in Chicago with producer John Agnello.^[1] The opener carries that adolescent, unfinished energy. It does not sound like a band chasing a career. It sounds like three friends discovering how much noise they can make together.

What “anti-glory” might mean

The title invites a reading, so it is worth being plain about what is known and what is inference. No interview I found ties the phrase to a specific meaning. The following is interpretation, offered as such.

Glory implies a hierarchy: a few people lifted up, many watching. An anti-glory song would then be one that refuses that arrangement. Its pleasures are collective and a little scruffy, and it prefers the dance floor to the pedestal. The music supports this reading. The guitars are bright but rough, the rhythm lurches rather than marches, and nothing in the arrangement behaves like a victory lap.

The band's own dedication points the same way. In the statement that accompanied the album, they described the song and record as being for Chicago, for their friends and their friends' bands, for everyone who can play guitar and everyone who cannot.^[4] That last clause is the closest thing to a thesis. Glory is for the people who can do the thing well. The band says the music belongs to those who cannot, too.

Frustration and the call to move

Reviewers have described the verses as grave and frustrated, sitting on a heavy bassline, with a chorus that swings the mood toward dancing.^[5] Another critic hears a yearning for connection delivered with a disaffected edge.^[5]

This tension is the engine of the track. The verses carry weight, the sense of someone stuck with an unease they cannot quite name. The chorus answers not with an explanation but with an instruction to the body. Rather than resolving a feeling, the song offers a way to move through it alongside other people.

That is a recognizably post-punk idea, and it fits the way critics have placed the band between post-punk and indie rock. Wikipedia lists their genres as post-punk, indie rock and jangle pop.^[2] The Line of Best Fit hears eighties and nineties indie with gritty textures.^[4] Pitchfork and other writers have pointed to Sonic Youth, Yo La Tengo and Stereolab as touchstones.^[1]

Ambiguity as a method

Horsegirl's lyrics tend toward fragments and images rather than stories. In their Clash interview, Cheng said the band likes to reach for unusual images and to walk a line between the beautiful and the disgusting, and the magazine describes their sound as sheets of fuzzy guitar, ambiguous lyric fragments, and dissonance paired with pretty melodies.^[3]

Seen that way, the opener is less a confession than a mood board. It gathers a feeling of dissatisfaction, a pulse, and an invitation, and lets the listener assemble the rest. A song with a tidy meaning would be at odds with the title. Glory demands a clear narrative of achievement. Anti-glory can afford to stay blurry.

Penelope Lowenstein described their process in a way that fits: an idea changes in her basement and then becomes a Horsegirl song once the three are in the studio.^[3] The meaning, in other words, is made by the trio together, not handed down by a single author. That too is a quiet argument against the lone-genius model of rock stardom.

Why it resonated

The album reached listeners as a return of a certain kind of guitar record. It was released on June 3, 2022, running just over thirty-three minutes, and drew critical acclaim, with an 82 on Metacritic, 7.3 from Pitchfork and an eight out of ten from The Line of Best Fit.^[1][4] Many reviewers praised its nineties indie sound, while a few felt it leaned close to its influences.^[1]

Part of the appeal is generational. The band came up in a scene where kids ran their own zines, shows and venues, and the opener feels like a postcard from that world. Sonic Youth's Lee Ranaldo and Steve Shelley guested on the record, after Agnello arranged it without consulting the band,^[1][3] which gives the debut the feel of a handing-over between eras.

There is also something timely about a song that turns down glory in an age of personal branding. Not every listener will read the title as a statement. Even so, its pleasure is easy to hear: it is the sound of people enjoying one another's company at high volume.

Other ways to hear it

There are other plausible readings. The title could be wry, a joke about a band so young and so quickly praised that glory felt absurd. It could also describe the song's structure, in which the expected rock payoff is withheld in favor of repetition and groove. Or it might simply be a phrase the band liked the sound of, which would suit a group that treats words as texture.

None of these excludes the others, and the lack of an official explanation seems consistent with the band's habits. Their lyrics are open by design.

Where the song sits on the record

Placement matters here. On the album, the song is track one, running three and a half minutes, and every track on the record is credited to all three members.^[1] On the vinyl pressing another track comes first, but for most listeners it is the front door.

From there the record moves through the singles that followed: first came Billy in late 2021, then World of Pots and Pans and Dirtbag Transformation ahead of the album.^[1] The Line of Best Fit heard a more impressionistic, layered approach than the band's earlier work.^[4]

Against that backdrop, the opener works as a thesis statement in miniature. It has the repetition and groove of the band's noisier influences, but it is also unusually welcoming. Where many guitar records begin with a snarl, this one begins with an open door.

The pull of the dance floor

It is worth lingering on the chorus's gesture toward dancing, because it shows how the band thinks about feeling. Dancing is a collective, bodily, unglamorous activity. Nobody dances alone in a way that earns applause, and nobody dances well enough to be crowned. It is the opposite of a spotlight.^[5]

That is why the idea fits the title so neatly. A song that frets in its verses and moves in its chorus is saying that discomfort does not have to be solved by climbing higher. It can be shared out, passed around a room, and shaken loose.

The group's background supports this. They grew up in a scene where mutual aid was the norm: friends booking friends, zines documenting local bands, parents driving teenagers to gigs.^[3] In that setting, glory is not the goal. Showing up is.

A modest anthem

The band announced the album in March 2022 alongside this single,^[1] and in the years since, they have only built on it, releasing the Cate Le Bon produced Phonetics On and On in 2025.^[2] Looking back, the opener stands as a statement of how they wanted to work: together, in public, and without pretending to be larger than they are.

It makes the case that a song can be an anthem without being triumphant. The chorus asks people to move, the verses admit that things are hard, and the band stays among the audience rather than above it. That, more than any explanation of the title, is the meaning that survives repeated listening.