Interview: CocoRosie Embrace Boldness Through Their Genre-Bending Eighth Album, 'Little Death Wishes'

Just as meaningful, eccentric, and fearless as their previous albums, CocoRosie’s transformative eighth record, ‘Little Death Wishes,’ “boils everything CocoRosie down to its most brutal essence.”

by guest writer Kayleigh Schweiker

Stream: ‘Little Death Wishes’ – CocoRosie

Outfitted in a blue ballgown, Sierra Casady sings operatically while Bianca Casady live-produces beside her.

A bra flies toward the stage from the crowd – Sierra swings it above her head playfully as a group centerstage embraces, gyrating rhythmically. As the music bleeds into one of the duo’s most recent singles, “Pushing Daisies,” onlookers sway atop a roller-skating rink turned performance venue. The crowd is illuminated by glowsticks that create a vibrant technicolor atmosphere, mirroring the sisters’ own.

At Xanadu Roller Arts on March 28, CocoRosie celebrated their latest album, Little Death Wishes, with a Jubilation Ball: An Ecstatic Tits Out Rave. In short: An aural feast. Known for their experimental sound, bold live performances, and for being selected by The Guardian as having one of the “worst album covers of the ‘00s,” CocoRosie – Bianca (“Coco”) and Sierra (“Rosie”) – are renowned as the multi-hyphenate talent on the frontlines of freak folk and “New Weird America.”

Little Death Wishes - CocoRosie — Little Death Wishes – CocoRosie

Since their first joint venture in 2003, CocoRosie have masterfully blended themes of sisterhood, generational hardships, and heartache within music that draws upon Sierra’s classical opera training and Bianca’s literary background. Just as meaningful, eccentric, and fearless as their previous albums, Little Death Wishes, the band’s eighth record, is an essential layer to the rich tapestry laid out by their previous works.

With twenty years of music in their rearview mirror, Little Death Wishes “boils everything CocoRosie down to its most brutal essence.” Both baroque and theatrical, bombastic and simplistic, the record is as genre-bending and transformative as it is a refuge for “criminal queers,” and an inspiration for artists to uninhibitedly self-express.

Before the release of Little Death Wishes and their celebratory Jubilation Ball, I sat down with the duo to discuss the new record, their affinity for performance, and the healing properties of shit-talking over a plate of french fries.

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:: stream/purchase Little Death Wishes here ::

:: connect with CocoRosie here ::

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Watch: “Nothing But Garbage” – CocoRosie

A CONVERSATION WITH COCOROSIE

Atwood Magazine: It's been five years since you released your last album, Put The Shine On. How do you feel like Little Death Wishes is a continuation of your previous work?

Sierra Casady: There’s a track on our new record, “Least I Have You.” That was kind of a transition from the two records.

Bianca Casady: We also encountered a few musicians when we were recording – they were recording next door. Texas based, really incredible musicians. They played a bit on the last record and it inspired us. I feel like we continued to go a little bit deeper into funk on this record, but it started with Put the Shine On. “Nothing But Garbage,” “Pushing Daisies” – specifically in the bass and the drums, we’re just finding our way into funk, and you know, it took twenty years for us to get to that point.

I know you've described the presence of the Bloody Sisters (a character duo you infuse into some of your songs) on some of your previous records. Do you feel like the Bloody Sisters are present on Little Death Wishes at all?

Bianca: We’re like the Junkie Sisters [on Little Death Wishes].

Sierra: The Junkie Twins. It’s a little different. The answer is yes – I think that that style of singing you can hear a little bit in the first track, [“Wait for Me”], but some of the goth has lifted, you know? And maybe in this record we reveal some emotional transformation of those characters. That’s there still, just in a different way.

So much of Little Death Wishes feels centered around the idea of a transformation. You describe the album as “an effort to turn pain into knowledge, sisterhood into polemic, trash into treasure, and recalcifying kitsch and cliché into fresh truths.” How did you land on this theme and why do you feel like it's poignant to CocoRosie now?

Sierra: I don’t want to dumb it down, but these things might have first spawned from our emotional state. We’re transforming our shit into better feelings, and talking about the bad things that happened to us, and just talking shit, talking trash, being nasty and with that–or in that process – maybe our hopes can grow. And so that might have been in our emotional state, and so I think maybe we fell into telling these stories.

Shit-talking can be healing in a lot of ways, I feel like.

Sierra: Yes!

Bianca: Yes!

It's a fun thing. You've described your work before as an observation of the world through a child's point of view. How do you balance that childlike perspective with the complex themes you integrate into your music?

Bianca: We use the child’s perspective more as a sort of license to be honest, to be brutal, and to be confused – it’s like a mirror. And so that perspective is just sort of an aspect of the way that we tell stories. I don’t feel like it’s a huge part of the storytelling of this record. It’s a little bit closer to our age, [Little Death Wishes]. We’re really enjoying our age in this record, and it’s kind of representing divorcees and mothers. Maybe you start having people pass away in your family and life gets deeper and deeper as you get older. But still, we feel really young, and the music itself is pretty young–but I think the themes are just getting to have more depth.

How would you say your creative process has transformed since the band’s inception, as sisters and as CocoRosie?

Sierra: In just looking at the art, we have played in incredible studios with incredible musicians. We were so excited about the adventure, being in beautiful places and beautiful studios. And in this last record, it was just Bianca and I in the bedroom, and it was better than ever. So it’s hard to say – I feel like it was this way in the beginning, too, where we were having a lot of fun because no one was watching. And we started to do that again [on this record], and we were remembering that.

You began making music together in a bathroom in Paris. How do you feel like making music in a quiet, simplistic space like a bedroom or bathroom affects your work?

Sierra: I think it’s a lot more focused when we’re in a smaller, less professional space. We get very maximalist and excited in big studios with a lot of gear. But, then we have all this material that we still have to boil down. It’s kind of rare that we just nail the song in a big studio. But “Pushing Daisies,” “Nothing But Garbage,” and our single, “Witch Hunt,” were practically all done on the same children’s keyboard, including bass lines and everything. Just getting a system down that’s so straightforward.

I feel like we’re not trying to prove anything with music; it’s just to get ourselves inspired. Sometimes we do a lot of songs until we get to that point, and we did the song “Nothing But Garbage” and we knew we found something different there. It became kind of the center of the record once we hit that point, but we were already a good year and a half into the process.

You mention playing on children's keyboards. How does that translate into your music?

Sierra: Well, we’re still currently in that phase of simplicity, but we’re starting to work with other musicians and make arrangements for string players and translate that kind of naïve, simple approach into something much more grand. We’re in the beginning stages of that transition. So often what we do with records is, we kind of collage them together, and then it’s a whole new process. But I think more and more, [CocoRosie] needs less in order to create songs.

A few reviewers have cited Put the Shine On as CocoRosie’s “return to maximalism.” How do you feel like Little Death Wishes answers to that?

Bianca: I don’t think [Little Death Wishes] is totally maximalist – it’s bombastic. Especially in the drums, it’s like…woah. It’s bold. It’s still pared down, and I think it’s boiled down to what’s more essential.

One part on the album that I really love is “Luckless.” Can you talk about that piece, and how that came to be?

Sierra: That was pretty spontaneous. We were in a studio, so it wasn’t one of those bedroom moments.

Bianca: But I don’t think that’s so relevant. That was a special moment. It was not random and improvised–not at all. It was something Bianca requested of me. Sometimes we play games like would you rather, or trade roles, or give each other different tasks in order to see what happens creatively. We were in that space, and I had played some really old-timey music on an old Mellotron, and that reminded [Bianca] of something, so she asked me to read this poem.

So it was like a challenge. But the next part of the story is that [“Luckless”] was archived and in some dusty folders. And our new label asked if they could have permission to go through those folders and they were like, we want this. I was like, oh, some dusty old poem? [They also chose] a couple songs that we didn’t think would make it onto the record, so it was kind of sweet.

One song on Little Death Wishes, “Girl in Town,” features Chance the Rapper. Why did it feel right to include “Girl in Town” on this album, and what did the process of creating music with Chance the Rapper look like?

Bianca: We’ve had a few features on our records before, but not a lot. The main person that comes to my mind is our good friend ANOHNI, but many records back. That’s been somebody that has recurrently guested. But this is a further genre reach, which is fun. Chance reached out to us and expressed that he was inspired by our music starting pretty young, and we just kind of answered the call to try something totally new.

Sierra: I guess my answer is not contradictory, but different a little bit. We were working on “Girl in Town” for the record, and we were excited about it, and we showed it to Chance, and he was like, “Get me on it.”

Coco Rosie at Baby Grand in Santa Fe, New Mexico © Kate Russell

How does your performance style influence the music that you create? What do you think is most special about live performance and blending your instrumentalism with lyricism?

Bianca: Live performance took us by surprise. It wasn’t a plan in our lives before experiencing it, but our band kind of grew all of a sudden when it came into real life. And we spent many, many years on the road. And after a while, it just became so central to our creative process. More than other places and things and doing records. And I think–I don’t know if it’s because we spend so much time [performing] maybe–it became essential for our expression.

Do you both compose outside of CocoRosie?

Bianca: Not a lot. But there are areas where CocoRosie gets drawn into other kinds of projects where we have to be more, or different, from the quintessential CocoRosie. And we talk about producing each other, because we do have these different ends of the spectrum that are complementary. Theater is a place where that can really play out. I like to make really experimental, abstract music, and use Sierra’s voice. I feel like she’s had some desires to produce me as a vocalist in another way, too. I have done my own music, and it’s obvious if you hear my music by myself, how vast our differences are.

How do you feel like your individual styles differ?

Bianca: I’m kind of, like, the furthest thing from pop when I work by myself, no matter how hard I try. I can bring, I think, a lot of pop to CocoRosie, but if Sierra’s not there…it’s far from pop. It’s f*ed up. My solo record to me sounded like, at best, a lot of sweet little animals making music together, you know?

CocoRosie: (L) Sierra Casady, (R) Bianca Casady © Daria Miasoedova

It's kind of Snow White-ish.

Bianca: Just a little scratchier. The tunes are a little looser, the sense of melody. I’m curious to hear what Sierra has to say about this.

Sierra: I never write music outside of CocoRosie. Never, never, never. And it’s terrifying for me to even think about doing that. CocoRosie is like a magical spell for me. But outside of that, the last thing I want to do is music. Although I have a background and a training in music, classically, this is a different world. But as far as composing songs and stuff alone, it’s terrifying to even think about it.

How did you land on hosting something as jubilant as a Tits Out Rave Celebration for the Little Death Wishes’ album release party?

Bianca: We feel like it’s pretty in line with just letting it all hang out. I don’t know why we got so slutty in this record, but it’s a theme that somehow carried more of our stories. The personas just sort of went in that direction. It’s all just in the idea of owning it.

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