Horse Vision is Johan Nilsson and Gabriel von Essen, a pair of Stockholm-based musicians who began releasing music in 2023 and dropped their debut album, Another Life, last year. Their first ever U.S. tour made a pit stop in Philly on April 24 at RUBA, a small venue in Northern Liberties.
Horse Vision is “essentially a classic rock band,” self-described as “not against the mainstream or the new [and in defiance of] the so-called DIY or indie scene,” per their album’s liner notes. Music writers situate Horse Vision within the burgeoning landscape of “cloud-rock” (refer to Nina’s #cloudrock iceberg diagram) along with the likes of ML Buch, Chanel Beads, Nourished By Time, and others. Cloud-rock blurs traditional pop and rock, with elements of dream-pop, shoegaze, hip-hop, and electronica—take the signature sound of the “increasingly prolific and important Copenhagen scene,” whatever that means.
The band played a set of mostly songs from their album Another Life, released March of last year. Live, their performance was pared back — my personal favorite, “Chemicals” (ft. Tiffi M) found itself stripped down to its most basic elements. These elements work in the duo’s favor, however, in live and recorded versions. Their guitar solo on “Segundi Garinasso” (the track with “Gold Dust” by Duster as its blueprint) was as honest as it was well-executed.
Yet a look around RUBA that night told you the crowd longed to dance. While the acoustic elements were technically sound, their synthesized counterparts needed to be turned up a notch. The best songs were ones we could move to, ones with textures playing from the band’s laptop, ones like “11” where you could hear M.I.A.’s “Bad Girls” in the back.
Though there was a clear intention for a guitar-centered sound, the two guitars were too loud, and I found myself wanting more vocals. But despite the volume issues, their voices blended well when I could hear them.
Chatting with Johan after the show, I found out that the band’s namesake is the annual HorseVision festival in Sweden, a place horse enthusiasts go to buy and sell horse breeds, horse equipment, and other horse-related memorabelia. As a child, Gabriel wore a t-shirt with the festival’s name on it, which made its way to inspire the band’s name. We spoke about their broken suitcase, Amtrak, and how difficult it is to walk along the highway in U.S. cities.
Oklou 4/28
Four nights later, I stood with my buddy KP, feet glued to the ground of Union Transfer’s balcony. Here, at the site of Bryn Mawr alum Michelle Zauner’s coat check (Zauner worked at the venue while in college), Oklou played a sold-out show on her choke enough tour.
Oklou (pronounced “OK, Lou”) is the project of French singer, producer, and DJ Marylou Vanina Mayniel. Her soft, synth set made for a swaying evening. Imagine a venn diagram of Oklou and Horse Vision and the word SYNTH in its overlapping center.
She opened with “ict” off her debut album choke enough, released in February 2025. The performance contained a stunning trumpet solo and synth keyboard throughout. On later tracks, the digiclarinet, tambourine, and flute all made appearances too.
In between songs, Oklou spoke to the crowd about childhood. “When you are a kid you already have tastes, you just don’t know how to articulate them. I have always liked a gentle, soft, synth sound, and that hasn’t changed.”
While her professed sound wouldn’t typically find its way onto the cloud-rock iceberg diagram, its consistency is still reminiscent of the cloud-rap genre: dreamy, chalky, Yung Lean-y. Above all else, Oklou knows how to perform a pop hit. If you were to close your eyes while the crowd sang along to “blade bird,” you really could’ve pretended it was a Shawn Mendes show. Hashtag heartfelt.
Pitchfork’s review of choke enough credits it for being “more formally compelling than it is viscerally moving,” and goes on to say, “perhaps that’s by design,” though, since “pop music is so often about the elevation of a persona above all else, a springboard from which to launch a star.”
Oklou’s persona amply captured the heads at Union Transfer that evening. No one could peel their eyes away from her slow and deliberate movement. Towards the end of the show, she put an armor headpiece on, and the light made her head turn into a disco ball.
