The first time Grace Shaw played her song Horses for a friend, “her face kind of scrunched up, and she just started crying”. It wasn’t an isolated reaction. When Horses was released, fans crowded into comments sections to report breaking down in tears the first time they heard the softly devastating pop song, one of Shaw’s first new releases as Mallrat in more than two years.
Horses is mostly a song about returning home – Brisbane, in Shaw’s case, the city she left years ago but still “reps hard”. Its first verse explicitly references memories of catching the train home with her little sister Liv, who died last May aged 21. Horses was written before that seismic loss but it feels like the quiet howl of grief. “Can somebody let me out of myself?” Shaw begs.
