Bianca Casady, best known as Coco of the freak folk duo CocoRosie, has dropped her Bianca Casady & The C.i.A. project's debut album titled Oscar Hocks. The 12-track LP is out now via JD Samson of Le Tigre's Atlas Chair imprint in North America and FANTASY Music in the rest of the world. Stream it here:
Ahead of the release, the project shared two videos for tracks from the LP, "Roadkill" and "Poor Deal." Like those tracks, the rest of Oscar Hocks finds the artist adding the elements of rock via electric guitars and drums as well as various different vocal stylings to the experimental fairytale-esque carnivalesque freak-folk that defines CocoRosie.
The "Roadkill" video was made with the Norwegian Theatre Academy last winter. In a note accompanying the video, the artist adds that it was filmed where she directed her second play, Mother Hunting. Watch it below.
In a recent interview with Noisey's Suzannah Weiss, Casady described Oscar Hocks as "very anti-pop." She explained "The more I work alone, the more I regard CocoRosie as really pop, even if it's not mainstream. It's dealing with pop music, even if it's subverting it. My music's very anti-pop in every way-tonally, the structures are really unpredictable, there's no resolution. It's really not people-pleasing."
The artist explains that the solo project finds her "getting to know herself musically," Noisey reports. In the singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist's words: "I'm finding this punk side of myself. It was always there, but I kind of forgot about it. I'm even performing songs I wrote when I was 12 years old and I was more of a punk."
As SPIN reports, Casady & the C.i.A. spent the end of 2015 on the Porno Thietor Tour across Europe. The tour featured musical theater performances rather than a typical concert format: dancers performed visual narrations of each storybook song while Casady performed from the sidelines.
The artist also created a book titled Porno Thietor. The book, which features a pastiche of poems, photographs and "fragments," is available with vinyl purchases online and at merch tables at live performances.
