HorsegiirL proves the neighsayers wrong with her joyous, whimsical dance music

T here’s an old saying Germans whip out when faced with an unlikely situation: “Well, I’ve seen horses throwing up,” they might shrug.

It’s physically impossible for our equine friends to hurl, so it’s another way to say: “Stranger things have happened.” Stranger yet, this year saw a half-horse, half-human release a major-label debut album.

HorsegiirL (or Stella Stallion) barnstormed her way into the dance sphere thanks to her viral 2022 track ‘My Barn My Rules’, touring relentlessly for years afterward and continuing her streak of cheeky club anthems with tracks like ‘Eat, Sleep, Slay, Repeat’ and ‘Material Hor$e’.

But this year, Stallion released her most serious effort yet – her long-awaited album ‘Nature Is Healing’.

The record, she says, required a self-imposed three-month break from touring so she could finish making it, an anomaly for Stallion, who describes herself as “a workhorse through and through”.

That appears to ring true today; over Zoom, Stallion tells NME she’s been renting a house in the German countryside to make new music.

“We are still in the Year of the Horse,” she audibly grins.

“I still have so much creative energy that I thought… it’s not just gonna be the album this year.” Stallion’s industriousness might come as a surprise to those who assume the DJ was a gimmicky cash cow in the vein of Crazy Frog or the Gummibear.

But hear it straight from the horse’s mouth: this is a serious artistic pursuit for Stallion.

“I’m a musician first before I am a DJ,” she tells us.

“I’m stepping into the thing that I naturally do more, which is to make the record that wants to come out of me.” HorsegiirL on The Cover of NME.

Credit: Michael Anthony Baumann for NME Stallion’s origins in the human world began as a youngster, where she was known as a tastemaker among her friends.

“People would trust that I would play good stuff, and I always loved digging for music on DatPiff and all these random pages where you could download mixtapes,” she recalls.

Around 2018, Stallion moved to London, where she began to hone her skills DJing at friends’ parties: “I realised, ‘Oh, you can actually make some money being a DJ’, and I thought it would be cool to know it as a skill.” Whether it was hip-hop , trap , grime or jungle , every genre was welcome on the decks.