Davey is angel-white and beautiful, his cheeks freckled with dark markings, and has a winning attitude to boot. He is clearly the pride of the herd, but today, he is starstruck.

“Breathe, breathe,” Kiki Ebsen, the owner of The Healing Equine Ranch, instructs horsegiirL, the most famous (half) horse since Seabiscuit. We’re at the edge of the many-acred property, where the horses’ hooves have ground the grass to dust and great oak trees shade us in 85 degree heat. horsegiirL takes hold of Davey’s rein. After several deep inhales, they relax into one another, their breaths syncing: horse to half-human, half-horse. The animal kingdom is in alignment.

As they take photos together, Davey and horsegiirL’s ears keep pricking. Supposedly, horses have supersonic hearing. To test this, I ask horsegiirL what she hears. She closes her eyes, and opens them. “I hear birds, I hear insects, I hear a dog breathing, I hear the wind,” she says, looking around, her voice soft and shy. “I feel very at home.”

Horses pay great attention to detail and often respond to things that go unnoticed by humans. They live in the moment, continuously vibing with the energy that surrounds them. horsegiirL is encouraging humans to be more like horses.

Over the past five years, the 26-year-old Berlin-based DJ, producer, and pop star has transformed an equine fever dream into a bona fide cultural phenomenon, drawing a devoted following of normies and farmies through a sugarcube blend of Eurodance, happy hardcore, gabber and trance that forces them into the moment through sheer silliness. Through horse puns — “you can ride me bareback”— and farmyard buffoonery — like bestiality anthem “f0rbiidden l0ve$tory” — she has created a world where people can leave reality at the stable door, and eat, sleep, slay, repeat like no one’s watching. As horsegiirL's profile has grown, so too has the scope of her vision, culminating in her debut album, Nature Is Healing, which arrived June 5.

The day before the album’s release, we’ve convened at a secluded ranch in the Santa Monica Mountains so she can decompress. She arrives in a black Bronco, and her publicist tells me I’ll be speaking to the “human half” of horsegiirL before she changes into her horsey get-up for photos. With the assistance of her plastic surgeon, Sita Messer, who gives her a quick ten-minute touch-up in the barn, she transforms.

Humans reading this might mistake the “human” half for the “real” half. But the human and the horse are no more real than one another. As the horsegiirL project makes clear, to exaggerated drag-queen-and-wrestler effect, realness is a performance in itself. Fantasy and reality, human and horse. Within horsegiirL’s world, everything is one and the same.

Nature Is Healing is about breaking these boundaries. It’s an ego-slipping record about returning to the pulse of the earth. On the album, the natural world is everywhere: burbling rivers, birdsong, dolphins, fungi, and frogs. There’s typical horsegiirL fare, too — gabber and hardstyle — but the album is also full of sincere, eco-spiritual anthems. “fun guy fungi” drifts into a jazzy, free-associative groove, and “take me to venus” harks back to ‘90s nu-age rave acts like The Orb and System 7 with its suntired, mallet-like synths. “Instinct takes me to the party [...] at the end, we’re all animals looking for some love,” she sings on it, the album’s philosophy summed up in one.

At the ranch, horsegiirL finds evidence of nature’s harmony everywhere. Sitting by the pool, where a Buddha head watches over the water and the bugs are in full buzz, she muses about how the rave is ecological. “Bees communicate through the rhythm of their wings. There’s something very ancient about the rave. There’s something archaic about a drum, and bodies moving, and coming together through this repetitive rhythm, and almost transcending the everyday,” she says. “I think it can help you to connect more to others and to your aliveness.” In the distance, horses gather and slowly drift toward one another. Some tussle, one or two keep their space. The scene is reminiscent of the club: clusters of dancers, and the lone people in the corner working through K-holes.

To realize the vision of Nature Is Healing, she enlisted some of the most inventive producers in dance music today, including Nomak (Charli xcx), Casey MQ (Oklou), Margo XS (Kim Petras, Zara Larsson), Elof Loelv (Icona Pop), FREE Jimi (Dorian Electra), Suena (Apache 207), A. G. Cook, as well as her trusted close collaborator Luvhunter. “It was such an amazing experience to be in the room with producers that I so admire,” horsegiirL says. The chemistry helped shape what is her most pop project yet.

Messer looks at his phone, and realizes the album is now out back home in Germany. horsegiirL says she’s scared. “I worry about being misunderstood,” she says. “It’s very vocals. I feel like a lot of my music before was very much about creating an armor to face this world, because it's so scary, so a lot of music was something to make myself feel strong. Like, you know, I'm hot, I'm sexy, I'm rich. I think this record is still uplifting, but maybe speaking more to your inner child and to the whimsicalness and wonder of things. I just hope people are open to that, you know?”

Nature Is Healing is concerned with all those timeless concepts — the inner child, whimsy, wonder, play — just as it’s interested in how those feelings are expressed right now. Not for nothing, the album title comes from a meme, something horsegiirL treats as today’s version of the hieroglyph. “In 100 years, people will have to study meme culture,” she says. The title also holds a double meaning: Nature Is Healing suggests that touching grass is good for the soul, and that nature itself is always healing and recovering.

horsegiirL belongs to a generation raised on the idea that they might be the last cohort capable of saving the world before it burns forever. But her mother, a geologist, taught her from a young age never to underestimate the resilience of planet Earth. “The planet has been around for billions of years. It’s going to be fine,” her mother always said.

Singing from the perspective of a horse is, in itself, an attempt to decenter humans. “Everything is so human centered,” horsegiirL says. “In such a technocratic, transhumanist, billionaire-driven world, it's important to challenge that, and to question that kind of human superiority.”

Being a horse in a human-centered space comes with its challenges, naturally. It invites in what horsegiirL describes as a “shock value”, with inevitable curiosity directed toward her. On first shock, people are often cruel, exemplified by the horsegiirL Instagram Reels that rarely appear without someone commenting beneath it, “what has the world come to?” For horsegiirL, the persona has come to feel like a Trojan Horse because, she says, “I can package all this. You can present it all pretty but you can also transport a lot of depth for people who dare to listen to it on a deeper level.”

horsegiirL’s “package” draws from the prefab mythology of 2000s pop stardom, complete with the usual fame fatigue, ayahuasca ceremonies, and plastic surgery rumors. (Farmies, the name she gave her fans, will notice that over the years horsegiirL has developed a thicker lip, smoothed out skin, and kissy marks on the muzzle. “I may have had a little snout job,” she confesses.)

The animal kingdom behaves just like our own, mirroring humanity back to us. Her idol, Crazy Frog — who, she says, is now class conscious and living on a pond commune, his fast-car lifestyle behind him — has followed a surprisingly similar trajectory. horsegiirL sees herself as part of this same lineage of anthropomorphic rave lords. “They’re my inspiration,” she says. Germany has produced more than a few of them, with Schnuffel the Bunny perhaps being the most famous.

Growing up in Germany, there was a moment when Crazy Frog’s “Axel F” was the ringtone on everyone's phone. horsegiirL remembers her older cousin picking her up from school in his Volkswagen Polo, its massive subwoofers blasting the hardcore and hardstyle that inspired the track. They would roll down the windows, let their hair blow in the wind, and head for the dike, where they would park up and drink.

It was a reprieve from horsegiirL’s rigorous classical music training. “I was obsessed with trying to play the trombone when I was three.” At age six or seven, she began branching out to other horn instruments, focusing on the French horn, and enrolled at a prestigious conservatoire. When she became a teenager, the family moved to a town in Germany with no good music schools. She joined a youth orchestra instead. “It was incredibly racist,” she says. “It really destroyed my love for those instruments because I associate them with the slurs I was called. My mom still has my euphonium in the attic. I haven’t touched it in years.”

Of Nature Is Healing, with the gorgeous, sonorous vocals her previous records had hardly showcased before, horsegiirL says she’s “really connecting to the R&B side of me.” It’s something she’d veered away from for years. “Growing up, I think one of the big things I never wanted to be was a stereotype, which happens when you're the only one in a space. You either assimilate or you try to prove that you’re different. So for a long time, even though I enjoyed listening to R&B and rap, I didn’t want to do that because I felt like it was expected of me.”

Electronic music’s history of Black originators is obvious, but horsegiirL has tended to play what she describes as “white” subgenres — gabber, hardcore, Eurodance — “Eurodance obviously ripped off a lot of Black singers, but they are quite white, and that was maybe subconsciously a part of me just wanted to go to a place where I didn’t feel there was representation.”

When she first made music for “the human centered space,” she had no venue or niche in mind. She curated her sets with whatever was fun to her: the fresh take on Eurodance, hardcore, gabber, nightcore, super fast SoundCloud edits, baile funk, guaracha, “and everything that was also very internet,” she says. They are sounds she considers “very young and very imperfect and very punk.”

“That was not what was in the club at the time,” she says, adding that the norm was six-hour sets of minimal techno or house. She was the first DJ to play Crazy Frog in Berghain’s Panorama Bar. “And I played Hampton the Hamster too. These hoes had never heard that. That night, it really brought everyone together.”

From her very first sets, horsegiirL realized that people just wanted to cut loose and it didn’t matter who was behind the decks or what they looked like. She’d always viewed fantasy and childlike whimsy as a source of wisdom and connection. Why not use that as a way of giving people permission to drop their inhibitions?

In her farmies, horsegiirL sees a reflection of herself that goes beyond mirrors and perfection. “With them, it’s not about being perceived.” The lesson humans should take from horses is simple: stop looking at yourself.

“I don't see any reason in going out, and then just standing around, worrying about how my makeup looks. I can understand that there's a lot of insecurities, that's why people are like that, but for me, I wanna let the music take over,” she says. “I think it's an act of resistance, against any kind of beauty standards, to just shake some ass, get sweaty. The world is so hard already. At the rave, I want to leave that at the door.”

It's not for nothing that so many pop stars have gravitated toward club music in recent years: FKA twigs, Beyoncé, Harry Styles, and more. The club offers a rare space where they can disappear into the crowd. When Billie Eilish played Berlin last year, horsegiirL gave her a taste of that anonymity. She took Eilish and her team to Berghain, where phones and cameras are banned.

“I think she ended up staying until 7 a.m., just dancing, you know? Just having a cute time, because it's a space where no one takes photos, and no one is bothering you. It’s not like a VIP club, where it’s about being seen. And that was very beautiful to see and to witness. She probably hasn’t had lots of these experiences without waking up to lots of videos online.”

At the ranch, as the photographer finishes up, there’s no one but the horses to impress. “I think it’d take a while for them to accept me as part of the herd,” horsegiirL remarks. They were a little judgemental of her at first, but she’s used to it, she doesn’t mind. She wanders back toward the pasture, and a number of horses move with her, led by their own instinct. Nature, at least in this moment, is healing.