Horsebag — “Nobody Like You” Album
Released January 23rd, 2026
Horsebag is releasing our first studio album, Nobody Like You, in January 2026. While Horsebag has been playing together for over thirteen years, this album is a culmination of our transition from an occasional, improvisatory project (more of a concept than an actual band) towards a full-fledged musical outfit (circa 2023) with fully-defined songs and a regular live presence in and around Portland.
We recorded this album with Ry Malloy in July 2025 in one live session, staying true to the necessary interplay between each of our component parts.
The album cover and related designs were composed by me, making use of the paper-mache “lump” created by our lead singer Teflon to launch into the crowd during performances of the song “Lump Talk.” Much of Horsebag’s lyrical and conceptual interests comes from the gaps and ambiguities in meaning created through literalism. In the case of “Lump Talk,” for example, Teflon muses on the various possible interpretations of the quality of lumpishness, while confronting audiences with the uninterpretable “there-ness” of the lump in actuality. The bars across the album cover could be said to represent the self-imprisonment of meaning-making, and the ways that the real (the literal, the object, the thing, the lump) are not actually imprisoned by meaning but only colored or inflected by it. The album title also reflects this, stemming from an anecdote one of our 6-year-old acquaintances experienced. They were given a Valentine’s card, as all classmates are required to furnish to everyone else in their class, by their elementary school nemesis, and that Valentine contained the ambiguous message “NOBODY LIKE YOU.” The quasi-grammaticality of this message stems two opposite meanings, meanings that test the literal transmission of language.
In addition to the album art, I designed a new run of shirts with a modular design based on the album cover, which I then animated into a music video of our lead-off single “Itchiest Shirt.” I also used this design to print yardage which I then used for our album release show poster (see below), which will then be turned into stuffed “lumps” containing a USB stick with our album on it. A self-imposed challenge for this album rollout was to use and recycle the design elements of the album in as many creative ways as possible, in order to test how far the DIY econo approach to making music can be taken.
Track Listing:
Itchiest Shirt
Checkout Line
Blood Jockey
Todd's Face Is My Face
Opened Your Mail
Lizard With A Knife
Piss Machine
Diseased Ape Enclosure
Lump Talk
Riding on the Back of a Bug
Saturate
Timeclown
Horsebag is:
Teflon Attackhouse - Vocals
Sean Cohan - Guitar
Clayton Collins - Guitar
Charlie Wilcox - Tuba + Bass
Vivian Tylinska - Drums
Engineered and mixed by Ry Malloy
Mastered by Will Killingsworth at Dead Air Studios
Album art by Charlie Wilcox
