Billy

Some songs introduce a person and then let the person disappear into the sound. "Billy" is built that way. It is named for someone who, by the band's own account, does not exist,^[1] and yet the whole track hums with the feeling of knowing him: a face half remembered, a story told in fragments over a loop of detuned guitar. It is the song Horsegirl chose to close their debut album, and it does the job of a closer by leaving a door open rather than shutting one.

The track is less a puzzle than a mood with a name attached. To understand what it means, it helps to look at how it was made, who it was made for, and why the band reached for an invented character at all.

Where the song came from

Horsegirl are a Chicago trio: Nora Cheng and Penelope Lowenstein on guitar and vocals, Gigi Reece on drums.^[3] They met as teenagers in the city's youth-run arts scene, and their debut album was written while they were still in high school.^[3] "Billy" arrived at the front of that story. It was the first single they released after signing to Matador, issued in November 2021, and it was later pressed on a 7-inch with a cover of the Minutemen's "History Lesson Part 2" on the flip side.^[1][3]

The band's own statement is unusually specific about the origins. The song grew out of roughly a year of near-daily writing and recording in Lowenstein's basement.^[1] Lowenstein had been reading about Nick Drake's alternate guitar tunings and detuned her own instrument in response. Cheng then laid a vocal part over it about a fictional character named Billy.^[1][2] The three finished the arrangement through improvisation, which fits what the band has said elsewhere about writing together in one room and letting a bandmate's first idea mutate until it becomes a Horsegirl song.^[4][2]

The sound also carries a map of the records they were absorbing. They had been listening heavily to the underground bands of 1980s and 1990s New Zealand, especially the Flying Nun label, and wanted to borrow that scrappy, homemade spirit.^[2] The result, as Beats Per Minute put it, is fuzzed-out guitar and dreamy harmonies.^[2] Clash heard a skewed earworm that marvels in its unexpected simplicity.^[5]

A character study with the details sanded off

Rolling Stone's headline for the single called it a compelling character study and a reverent tribute to long-gone music scenes.^[6] That pairing is the key to the song. Billy is a figure the narrator keeps circling, but the lyrics never fully fill him in. We get the sense of a person through repetition, rhythm and tone rather than through a biography.

This is how Horsegirl tend to write. In their Clash interview they described aiming for images that sit somewhere between beautiful and unpleasant, and pairing pretty melodies with dissonant, unsettling turns.^[4] Cheng and Lowenstein write the lyrics for the band,^[8] and across the album they favor fragments and impressions over literal storytelling. "Billy" is a clean example. The words work like a sketch: a few strokes that suggest a person, with the rest left to the listener.

There is also something deliberate about choosing a fictional subject at all. A made-up name gives a young songwriter room to say things sideways. Billy can be a crush, a classmate, a local legend, a type. He can be the kind of figure every scene produces, the one everybody has a story about. Because he is invented, the song never has to pin him down, and that vagueness is the point.

Nostalgia for a scene you never saw

The most revealing line in the band's statement is not about Billy at all. They call the song a tribute to music scenes they wish they had been able to see, and they call the video a love letter to their city and friends.^[1] That detail reframes everything.

Horsegirl were teenagers when they wrote this, born long after the New Zealand scene, the Chicago bands and the American college-radio underground they admired had peaked. Their nostalgia is not for their own past but for someone else's. It is the ache of arriving late to a party whose records you know by heart. In that light, Billy starts to look like a stand-in for the people who populated those scenes: figures you only know through songs and secondhand stories, vivid and unknowable at once.

The sonic choices back this up. Detuned strings give the track a slightly wobbly, sun-warped quality, like a tape that has been played too many times. The vocal rhythm is conversational and a little deadpan. Nothing is polished into a monument. It sounds like a memory being retold by someone who was not there.

The video and the friends in it

The video was shot in Chicago on a rainy day with the band's friends, and it has an unfussy, homemade feel.^[1] Coverage at the time described it as charming and lo-fi.^[2] That choice matters. A song about admiring communities is best illustrated by one, and the clip shows the band's own scene rather than inventing a glossy one. The tribute is happening in real time.

The band's note even invites listeners to play the song with friends and dance along.^[1] For a track so concerned with absence, that is a generous instruction. It points toward the idea that a scene is not something you inherit but something you make with whoever is in the room.

Closing the album

On Versions of Modern Performance, "Billy" sits at the end of a twelve-track, 33-minute record.^[3] The album was recorded in summer 2021 at Electrical Audio with producer John Agnello, and it earned warm reviews, including a Metacritic score of 82.^[3] Steve Shelley of Sonic Youth adds percussion to this track, a small but symbolic touch: a veteran of exactly the kind of scene the song longs for, playing on a song by teenagers who wish they had seen it.^[3]

One reviewer called it an excellent closer, with a jam that ends the record.^[7] It makes sense as a final statement. The album is full of shifting, oblique vignettes, and "Billy" lets them dissolve into a groove rather than resolving them. The story is not finished. It just keeps going after the tape stops.

Why a made-up name works

Indie rock has a long habit of naming songs after people: a first name stands in for a whole relationship, a whole social world. The device works because names carry weight before any detail is attached. Hearing one, a listener fills in the blank with their own Billy, whoever that was in their own life. Horsegirl lean into this. By keeping the character abstract, they let the song belong to anyone who has ever orbited someone more magnetic than themselves.

It also suits the way the band approaches performance. The album title itself plays with the idea of versions: of the modern, of performance, of how a thing gets restaged by each new generation. Billy, a figure rebuilt from secondhand impressions, is a version in exactly that sense, a restaging of an archetype by people who know it from records rather than from life.

The band has said that another title on the album, the one that sounds like a dramatic farewell, is really an in-joke rather than a grand statement,^[4] and a similar spirit applies here. There is humor in the plainness of the name, a shrug that keeps the song from sliding into solemnity. The tribute is sincere, but it is not precious.

Other ways to hear it

Because the band has been open about the song's inspirations but not about a single narrative, other readings are reasonable. One is that Billy is a portrait of a specific person from the band's circle, disguised by the fictional label. The statement says he is invented, so this should be treated as speculation, but songs often smuggle real people in through borrowed names.

Another reading treats Billy as an idea rather than a person: the romantic notion of a local hero, the figure on whom a scene hangs its mythology. A third is purely musical. Billy might be less a subject than a syllable, a short, friendly, repeatable name that fits the rhythm of the tune. Horsegirl's process, built on improvisation and group tinkering, makes that plausible. Sometimes the name came first and the meaning arrived later.

None of these readings cancel the others. The song seems built to hold all of them at once.

Why it lingers

"Billy" resonates because it captures a feeling that most music fans know: loving a time and a place you were never part of, and trying to reach it by writing your own version. It does this without sentimentality. There is no wistful narrator explaining the loss. There is a groove, a character with no last name, and a bunch of friends in the rain.

That restraint is what makes the song feel honest. It does not pretend to have revived a lost scene. It simply demonstrates what a scene feels like when three people and some detuned guitars are in a room together, making something up. For a debut album from teenagers, ending on a song about the joy of belonging, and about the people we invent to help us describe it, feels exactly right.