The Healing Power of Horses – In Yr Right Hand Reveal Heaven
The Healing Power of Horses are a Cambridge duo who signed to section1, the Los Angeles-based Partisan Records sister label (also home to RIP Magic, Blonde Redhead and King Princess), last month with i wait, i sink (W20). That track picked up Track of the Week from Loud & Quiet and BBC 6 Music’s Introducing Mixtape and got the expected attention from the DIY circuit. “In Yr Right Hand Reveal Heaven” is the second single, arriving with the announcement of their debut EP, “Summer Indoors (or outside wearing black)”, due July 17.
The band’s account of how the track came together is worth taking at face value: the first half was written in a ground floor tenement in Glasgow at the end of winter; then the saddest thing ever happened, they say, and the second half was written in an East Anglian attic. The lyric makes that rupture legible. The opening section circles obsession and voice and vision, with a specific biblical image at its centre: the tent of Yael, from Judges 4, where Sisera is killed in his sleep while seeking refuge, “be quiet it’s just an incision.” It’s violence delivered with intimacy and calm, which is a precise choice. The middle section swings ecstatically outward before the closing settles into something quieter and more troubling: a fantasy of self-erasure framed not as despair but as relief, the idea that leaving might produce harmony. The “tighten the knot” that opens the song and the “when I’m gone, maybe it will be okay” that closes it are in direct conversation. That’s a harder emotional register than “glitchy” and “lurching” covers, and it’s what makes the song stay.
The EP’s four tracks reportedly move through paranoia, mercy and hope, with arrangements that lurch between brittle rhythms and blown-out textures. The duo have been playing increasingly talked-about live shows around London, appeared at The Great Escape in Brighton, and have Pitchfork Paris confirmed in November. The June 11 Club Cheek show supporting RIP Magic sold out immediately. They describe their working method as spending far too much time in the attic and not enough time outside. On the evidence of this single, the attic is doing its job.
Tour Dates:
Europe:
- Nov. 5-7 / Paris, France / Pitchfork Paris
