There’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. Stallion has since expanded her taste as far as Cuban guaracha, Brazilian baile funk and Spanish makina (in 2025, she teamed up with Argentinian singer Six Sex for ‘Giirlsworld’). Meanwhile, the thundering, trotting kicks of early tracks like ‘My Little White Pony’ to more recent releases like ‘An Apple A Day’ draw from Stallion’s memories of watching village kids dance to Dutch hardstyle and hardcore.

Credit: Michael Anthony Baumann for NME

It’s her love for hardstyle and hardcore which formed her “punk” approach to DJing, but it also caused the Berlin techno scene to wrinkle their nose at her arrival in 2022. “I didn’t know that much about the current big DJs and all of these different clubs – I was just like, ‘this is a song I like, I’m just gonna play what makes me dance,” she explains. “Happy hardcore and hardcore were seen as this lower-class music from the 2000s that never had been allowed in more prestigious techno clubs. The city people looked down on that sound, even though a lot of them would secretly listen to bangers by Cascada or Scooter…”

The source of Stallion’s rebelliousness goes deeper than her feelings towards genre snobbery. She cites growing up in Germany as a “brown horse” as a reason why she “never felt a hundred per cent represented in [German techno]”.

“I’ve never been someone who wanted to be part of a clique mentality,” she professes. “I think there’s a deep part of me that, because I felt I was never part of mainstream German society, learned to accept that and be like… you know what? Either way I will stand out, so I might as well embrace it.”

Credit: Michael Anthony Baumann for NME

This week, Stallion will kick off her album tour, which includes an opening slot at a sold-out Robyn show in Los Angeles. She anticipates the tour being a nerve-wracking experience, owing to the radically different staging this time round: she’s off DJ duties, taking on the role of a popstar performer with backup snail dancers, whose shells bounce along to the basslines. “I was very drawn to snails; I felt really drawn to spirals representing time and experience and how this never-ending life cycle continues,” she tells us. “I think we can also learn to slow down from snails… although they can be quite fast.”

It’s a lesson Stallion learned during her self-imposed break to focus on ‘Nature Is Healing’. “I needed to stop touring because it was incredibly hard to combine” being on the road and making new music, Stallion admits. “That was the first time I had three months off the road in four years… I’m glad I did it because it was very needed.” She confesses, though, that she didn’t quite manage to stop everything: “When you make art, it is such a big part of your identity that you’re always on.”

“In times of activism fatigue and hopelessness, I think the real thing that we all crave is hope and joy”

Stallion came away from her break feeling reaffirmed in her mission to “let Mother Earth and other species speak a bit more than they are currently heard in contemporary pop music”, an “interspecial perspective” she credits to growing up with her geologist mother. She gifted the young Stallion with a magnifying glass to observe bugs with, and often shared her knowledge. “She is always very interested in looking at the sediment somewhere and dissecting what geological age it is from, and she travelled the world a lot,” Stallion explains, “so I grew up with a certain openness.”

Case in point: Stallion recalls an alarming school assembly encouraging the children to fight climate change. “I came home from school, and I was like, ‘Oh my god, Mum, we have to save the earth!’ She really dryly, in a very German way, said, ‘Well, if anything, we have to save ourselves… the earth is gonna be fine’,” she reminisces. “I was like, ‘Whoa, OK, true’. Nature is not this fragile little thing that is waiting to be saved.”

Credit: Michael Anthony Baumann for NME

‘Nature Is Healing’, then, doesn’t hammer any political position home. Instead, it lures you in with its earnest fascination with the world’s beauty. Stallion samples birds, insects, mammals and reptiles across the record, and includes trickling rivers in the title track. Songs like ‘Organic Intelligence’ mock AI by marvelling at biology (“I love the fact that bees are kinda democratic / And slime mould made a map of Tokyo”).

“When I think about the beauty of nature, I’m feeling love and excitement and curiosity towards the world,” Stallion says of the album’s tone. “I wanted those to be the main emotions in the album rather than, ‘We’re all gonna die’.”

“Either way I will stand out, so I might as well embrace it”

The bulk of the album is a far cry from previous songs bragging about leaving farm life for the hedonism of the city, or trying to pinpoint her lover’s star sign. In fact, many of the tracks don’t even have a four-to-the-floor beat; they’re trancey, downtempo jams that expand the HorsegiirL palette.

The slower, more serious turn on ‘Nature Is Healing’ wasn’t what fans expected, but it has resonated all the same. And as the project she’s spent the longest amount of time on, it’s the body of work Stallion has become the proudest of. “Most of my [prior] releases were either singles or EPs, and I didn’t approach them in such a serious way – which is not to say that I didn’t give a shit about them, but it was a lot less intentional,” she explains. “That’s why I feel so much pride with ‘Nature Is Healing’.”

The new songs Stallion has been working on are “for the club – it’s like the night version of ‘Nature Is Healing’”, she teases. These “more euphoric” tracks serve as a “puzzle piece”, further fleshing out her vision of the album – one she holds separate from public opinion. “I don’t try to think about what people make of my work once it’s out. I don’t have any control over that, and it muddies the creative waters,” she declares. “For me, it was really important that it’s still a hopeful and fun album. In times of activism fatigue and hopelessness, I think the real thing that we all crave is hope and joy.”

HorsegiirL’s ‘Nature Is Healing’ tour of the US, Europe and UK begins September 18.

Listen to HorsegiirL’s exclusive playlist to accompany The Cover below on Spotify or on Apple Music here.

Words: Alex Rigotti
Photography: Michael Anthony Baumann
Photo Assistance: Vincenz Gertoberens
Styling: Theresa Gross
Styling Assistance: Sabina Schimanowski
Hair/Mane: Soh
Makeup: Metox Aya
Fake FX: Sita Messer
Location: Oat Milk Studios
Label: RCA

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