A long dirt track, a half-drunk coffee in a diner, a late-night dive bar with a few lonely stragglers hanging on. Brown Horse are a band whose sound blurs the country twang of a life spent on the American road with the folk sensibility of their Norwich roots. In a world filled with chaos and distraction, Brown Horse’s music calls for reflection, contemplation, and a desire to run away from it all – preferably by horseback.
Watching Brown Horse live is uniquely disarming. It’s a Thursday night at The Crescent in York, and the band have just played ‘Twisters’ from forthcoming release Total Dive. There’s a faint pause before applause erupts: like the tornado of jangly guitars, deep synths and lead singer Patrick’s raw vocals, has swept up the room and momentarily left it still.
It’s this careful ability to layer sounds that has defined Brown Horse’s music since their first release, Reservoir, in 2024. Drawing on sonic motifs from country and folk rock, the band tread a careful line between the past and the present. It’s one that Patrick absolutely masters through his vocals, a voice that’s powered by the raw emotion of youth but underscored by a much older, pensive presence. There’s one line that lingers like an old photograph: ‘The good times passed and they never really stopped to say goodbye.’
Brown Horse grasps a poetic eye for locating the spiritual in artefacts of the everyday. With various band members contributing to songs, the group share their most beautiful lyrics in lines about the mundane. A greasy napkin or a wrinkled t-shirt: everyday objects are symbols seeped in a much deeper sense of longing. But that’s not to say that the band reduce this kind of emotion to melancholy. Every object of memory, however bleak, is also beautiful. And every object finds itself connected to a wider universal patchwork, like the quilted album cover to second release All The Right Weaknesses (2025).
Tracks like Corduroy Couch do this best, where lyrics about the passage of time are framed by images of tides turning and the promise of future fruit. Many songs start and end like roads through distant memories. Like washing your face in the bathroom mirror (Twisters), or watching snowflakes fall outside (Radio Free Bolinas), there’s a filmic quality to Brown Horse’s songs that makes it easy to imagine them as vignettes from a dream sequence.
Lingering behind the lyrics is the soft but heavy presence of the band’s instruments, calling out into the crowd. There are brilliant synths in the forthcoming track Hares, which conjure up a nighttime drive through a deserted highway. Halfway through the gig, the introduction of the accordion makes a striking addition to many tracks, too, casting harmonies around the sound with the emotion of a second singer. Being the final night in a string of concerts for Independent Venue Week, it feels special to be watching a band so beautifully wield the acoustics of The Crescent.
There’s a solace in Brown Horse’s music, in a feeling of nostalgia that’s both parts painful and comforting, where the past feels like a horse loosened from its reins. A special quality: one that will surely endure with the band’s forthcoming album arriving in April.