If you overheard someone in a pub talking about Therapy Horse, you might catch a muttered “They were loud, and scary.” Or maybe, “They sound awful, but in a good way.” And yet, that chaos is the point. Therapy Horse doesn’t aim to soothe, they aim to rupture, to release, to make you feel something primal and unfiltered.
Photo Credits: Christopher McDonnell
Therapy Horse craft music that’s equal parts sonic exorcism and emotional excavation. Their name, born from a moment of grounding and affection, nods to equine therapy and the strange comfort found in noise. “Cormac keeps me calm and grounded, like a therapy horse,” Emily (vocals/bass) recalls. “We had already started writing together by then, so it was a moment of, wait, I love that as a band name, let’s ditch all of our other ideas and use that.”
Despite the band’s reputation for volume and intensity, their influences are unexpectedly delicate. Cormac (vocals/guitar) cites ambient music - Brian Eno, Éliane Radigue, Sarah Davachi - as foundational to his guitar work. “A lot of the care for texture and timbre that those artists demonstrate within their music inspires my approach to the guitar; it’s probably most apparent on the intro to ‘LOVE / MERCY’ and the end of ‘LET ME BE CLEAR’ in terms of the tracks we’ve released so far, but that’s certainly an unexpected musical influence”, he explains. Poetry also threads through their lyrics, with James Waller’s Insomnia’s Gates haunting recent writing.
Emily’s inspirations swing between extremes: the lyric-forward intimacy of Big Thief and Wednesday, and the visceral weight of Mamaleek, Lingua Ignota, and Chelsea Wolfe. “I’d love to channel even a fraction of the raw emotion they deliver,” she says.
Photo Credits: Christopher McDonnell
When asked about dream collaborations, Cormac reaches for the avant-garde - Sonny Sharrock, Natalia Beylis, Skinner. Emily imagines a dark, genre-blurring project with HEALTH, citing their 2020 release DISCO4 :: PART 1 as a masterclass in unexpected synergy. “I feel like they’d work well with what we do as it’s all so dark and cool.”
Their latest single, ‘LOVE / MERCY’, draws from gothic literature and emotional ruin. If Therapy Horse were a character in a gothic novel? “The monstrous outsider,” Emily says. “Not in an edgy way just that sometimes in green rooms, I feel like we’re the weirdos in the corner. Individually, maybe some contemporary American Gothic desolate madwoman. Sometimes I do feel like Pearl, from Pearl (2022) onstage. Please I’m a star.”
Cormac sees himself as Poe’s narrator in The Tell-Tale Heart, “except the heartbeat is the urge to buy another reverb pedal”, he adds.
Themes of desperation, self-annihilation, and sacrifice run deep in their work. “Playing this music is cathartic,” Cormac shares. “Expelling those emotions at high volumes backed by a massive wall of noise is about as much of a release as one can ask for.”
Emily adds: “This music keeps me mellow. I don’t think I’ll ever shake off my teenage angst, and I definitely feel the darker lyrics and sounds of the artists I loved then–your Smashing Pumpkins, Soundgardens, and what have you–in the way I approach making music now.”
Photo Credits: Erin Plaice
Visually, ‘LOVE / MERCY’ evokes Lynch’s The Elephant Man, Rothko’s Black in Deep Red, according to Cormac and Tracey Emin’s The End of Love, if you ask Emily. “That gives Therapy Horse, as the kids say”, Cormac jokes.
What’s next? More recording, an EP in early 2026 set as the goal, and shows across Ireland and the UK. Catch them with The Low Field in Limerick and Dublin this October, and with SLYRYDES in Dublin this November.
LOVE/MERCY OUT NOW.
Words by
Marie Müller, 2025.