As avant-garde pop act CocoRosie, sisters Sierra and Bianca Casady have dedicated their careers to probing and exhibiting life at the fringes of society. Their lyrics, both sung and spoken, are always enigmatic and occasionally, as in 2004's racially charged "Jesus Loves Me," deliberately shocking. Their work tangles with race, gender, sexuality, language and history in ways that illuminate and obfuscate, in turn and sometimes simultaneously.
Their latest video, "Lost Girls," is taken from Heartache City, their self-released sixth album. The women described the album in an email by saying:
Unlike our more psychedelic/electronic explorations of the last two records, our latest songs have a dusty southern feel with old-timey poetry. We ended up in Argentina where we finished the recordings and mixed the record with engineer Nicolas Kalwill with whom we've worked on two previous records. The spirit of Buenos Aires added to our already teen-romance-nostalgic-mood ...
"Lost Girls," as Bianca told NPR, is a delineation of the perils faced by women every day. To illustrate the message, images of two female protagonists on the run accompany affecting poetry spoken by Bianca and sung by Sierra (who trained in opera). The video culminates powerfully in a shot for which the Casadys hired 30 young women in Buenos Aires, and which speaks to the universality of both pain and solidarity.
Heartache City comes out Sept. 18. Available for preorder now.
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