The delightful debut album from Horsegiirl—the brainchild of German DJ, singer, and producer Stella Stallion—Nature Is Healing is loaded with earworms, hard-bass muscle, and straight-faced lyrical absurdity, a potent combo not heard since the heyday of fellow Teuton maniacs Scooter and Brooklyn Bounce. It’s a deliriously silly, sneakily sturdy blast of Euro-rave pop that makes most respectable dance music sound downright ordinary.
A half-horse, half-human disc jockey singing about wellness, lust, and barnyard enlightenment over Balearic club beats sounds like the kind of gimmick that burns hot for a fraction of a second before getting swept into the algorithmic dustbin. But what keeps the album from curdling into novelty is that Stallion treats the supposedly unserious with a deadly serious level of musical craft. There’s no IDM here, apart from some glitched-out musique concrète on “Fun Guy Fungi,” but this is still intelligent dance music in the plainest, least chin-stroking sense.
Horsegiirl’s music pulls from international rave-pop language with stunning ease: hyperpop, bubblegum bass, hardstyle, Eurotrance, EDM, among others. “Hands Hands Hands” even makes a detour into Romanian popcorn, a subgenre known for excessive accordion riffs and hushed vocals, and Stallion plays the cheese straight enough for it to melt.
But Nature Is Healing isn’t just a sonic sugar rush. The album’s surface-level shine has teeth: “Earth Is Turning,” for one, is a skybound fusion of techno and house whose final acid-drenched breakdown is executed with near-surgical control. Even at their glossiest, these songs keep slipping something jagged under the saddle.
“Apple a Day” is the album’s pleasure principle in miniature. It is, on paper, one of the dumbest songs of the year: a happy-hardcore/gabber/hardstyle pileup about chasing off an irate doctor with a seemingly bottomless supply of red delicious apples. Then the chorus hits—“An apple a day keeps the doctor away/I’m just, I’m just, I’m just saying, vitamins are fucking great”—and the stupidity becomes gloriously transcendent. The song is funny, catchy, and punishing in equal measure—a novelty jingle running on rocket fuel. The real shock is how much of Nature Is Healing operates at the same level of deranged euphoria.
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