The Dance Scene’s Favorite Equine HorsegiirL on Healing & Identity: ‘Because I’m a Horse, People Can Project What They Want Onto Me’
Categoria: Musica
Amid her first North American headlining tour and the release of a new track fusing hardcore and country, horsegiirL talks about identity and taking her "nature chaos rave" on the road.
Por Billboard | 02/10/2026
HorsegiirL is opening for Robyn tonight (Oct. 2) at the Kia Forum in Los Angeles, but if she’s nervous or even antsy to get to the venue, she doesn’t let on. Instead, the German producer projects a sort of grounded calm when we meet at noon on a sunny patio in downtown Los Angeles. Here, the sound of a jackhammer pulverizing some nearby concrete functions as a sort of equal and opposite reaction to both her vibe and the body of work she’s most recently released, her June debut Nature Is Healing . Celestial and sincere but also often unhinged (listen for the cameo from The Doctor in the album’s “An Apple a Day”), the album helped cement horsegiirL’s status as a key of-the-moment dance star with strong pop girl (or pop horse) tendencies. These exist in both the structures of her music and the fantastical world building achieved through presenting herself as a stylish equine named Stella Stallion that exists in a natural wonderland world that’s like if Lisa Frank met Planet Earth . This persona isn’t a gimmick, but a fully realized artistic universe, with its own internal logic and a hyperpop-meets-pop-meets-hardcore-dance soundtrack that horsegiirL has been carving out since her come-up through the Berlin rave scene, which she broke out of with her 2023 single “My Barn, My Rules.” Planet horsegiirL has its own gravitational pull. In preparation for this story, I’m sent a folder of images of Stella Stallion with a bevy of other pop girls/peers: Sabrina Carpenter, Grimes, Cobrah, Zara Larsson, Kim Petras, North West. (There are also shots of her with actors Adam Scott and Lisa Rinna.) In April, she made cameos during the Coachella performances of English rock darlings Wet Leg and British dance pop star PinkPantheress , moments that followed her own 2025 Coachella debut. “A major shift was when I played Coachella last year,” Stallion says when contemplating her breakthrough. “I’d played Portola the year prior and that was already a big moment, and I think those two festivals plus what came after was a slow and steady growth.” She says her U.S. audience is now the biggest of anywhere in the world. Many of these fans will see horsegiirL on her North American headlining tour, which started Sept. 19 in Denver and gallops along through mid-November before heading to Europe. (Her routine for staying a healthy horse on the road: exercise, abstaining from alcohol and up to 10 hours of sleep a night. “I don’t care if people judge me for it, because I need the sleep,” she says.) The tour comes towards the end of a year that started, as horsegiirL recalls, with the first time she ever really felt like she belonged in the U.S. music scene. “It was during Grammy weekend,” she says. “There was this Spotify event I went to where it was like, ‘Wow! I don’t feel like an imposter all of a sudden. I have this invite becaus