When Jake Beitel spoke with Racket in 2022, it was the first interview the Prize Horse guitarist and vocalist had ever done. The three-piece was on its first tour, holed up in Indiana at a house belonging to an uncle of a member of one of the other bands.
“Feels like a long time ago,” he laughs today.
Beitel, bassist Liv Johnson, and drummer Jon Brenner have been awfully busy in the intervening two years, touring relentlessly with bands like Superheaven and KOYO and Webbed Wing and landing a set at this year’s massive Sound and Fury Festival in LA (one of just a few Minnesota bands to ever do so). They followed up 2022’s EP Welder with the full-length Under Sound, released this year to broad acclaim, and recorded an Audiotree Live session in April. Here in Minneapolis, maybe you’ve seen them provide local support to Hotline TNT, or Narrow Head, or Thursday.
Prize Horse could fit on a “recommended if you like” playlist for any of those bands. Their brand of “heavy shoegaze” is many things: grungy, metal-indebted, emo-tinged. It’s ominous-sounding and undergirded by a sense of unease (to echo the top comment on that Audiotree video, “bass tone insane”), but also riffy and loaded with hooks. You might enjoy it if you like Touché Amoré, or Title Fight, or Turnover.
Not to say that it’s upbeat. Throughout Under Sound, there’s a permeating feeling of stuck-ness and frustration, of being unsure what comes next. On tone-setting album opener “Dark Options,” Beitel sings, “Don’t wanna sit on the floor with it. Come over now, it’s gone. It left a hole in my stomach, I’ll find who did that and make them pay.” Like many of the album’s weightier offerings, the vocals aren’t direct about the source of sorrow so much as they are impressionistic. There’s a sense of grasping for something that’s not quite there.
“It definitely was written at a time when I was feeling pretty stuck, with a lot of things,” Beitel says, though that wasn’t an intentional theme so much as one that emerged over time. “Honestly, writing it made me realize a lot of things about myself, about how I was unhappy in my current situation.” He insists the album resolves its emotional turmoil on the more forward-looking closing track “Awake For It”—though he admits it’s Under Sound’s least-listened-to song.
Prize Horse has two tours left yet in 2024—one with Greet Death and another with grungy Indianapolis five-piece Wishy—with more dates planned out through the first half of 2025. In other words, as Beitel says, they’ve been hitting it very hard.
“That’s a thing that’s less common these days, honestly—a lot of bands are more focused on trying to get that one single that gets hot on TikTok or whatever,” he says. Prize Horse is doing it the old-fashioned way, getting themselves in front of as many people as possible. The buzz that’s building around them suggests it’s working.
“By no means is it a thing where it’s like, ‘I’m about to quit my job and go on tour.’ Well,” he thinks for a minute, “I technically did just quit my job to go on this tour. But I’m going to have to get a new job as soon as I get back.”
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