Cocorosie

Multi-disciplinary artists Bianca and Sierra Casady formed the project CocoRosie, which fuses an array of styles including hip-hop, folk, opera, electronic music, and found sounds into a singular, frequently moving aesthetic. From their debut effort Noah's Ark in 2004 onward, the pair merged Bianca's percussion and rap-influenced approach with Sierra's operatically trained singing alongside harp, piano, and guitar elements, achieving both emotional closeness and daring scope. Early listeners drew parallels to Animal Collective, Devendra Banhart, and Joanna Newsom, yet CocoRosie distinguished themselves across time through instinctive composition and an improvisational sonic palette. Their growing refinement surfaced clearly on 2007's The Adventures of Ghosthorse and Stillborn and 2010's Grey Oceans. Heartache City in 2015 highlighted the lighter, acoustic dimension of their work, whereas the more aggressive and exploratory Put the Shine On from 2020 confirmed that the Casadys continued to push boundaries with sounds entirely their own.

The sisters spent their childhood in a creative household that relocated often. Sierra Casady, the elder and a vocalist, guitarist, and harpist, entered the world in Iowa; during high school she began operatic studies, later relocating first to New York and then to Paris to advance her training. Bianca Casady, born in Hawaii, performed and composed throughout her youth yet kept the material private; she later pursued linguistics and sociology in New York while nurturing ambitions as a visual artist and writer. The siblings reunited in 2003 after Bianca joined Sierra in Paris, where the latter was enrolled at the Conservatoire de Paris. That summer they started crafting songs together and captured them inside Sierra's bathroom.

Although the Casadys planned at first to circulate the material solely among intimates, the recordings soon led them to adopt the name CocoRosie, drawn from childhood nicknames bestowed by their mother—Bianca as Coco and Sierra as Rosie. Touch & Go issued the bathroom sessions in March 2004 as La Maison de Mon Rêve, earning acclaim for its free-associative lyrics and ethereal mood. Their follow-up, the darker and more somber Noah's Ark from September 2005, took shape during travels and featured contributions from Anohni, Devendra Banhart, and French rapper Spleen. Also that year the duo supplied their initial film score, for the French feature Frankie.

Next the Casadys partnered with Björk associate Valgeir Sigurðsson on April 2007's The Adventures of Ghosthorse and Stillborn, a family-themed album centered especially on their late brother and tracked at their mother's farm in France's Camargue region. A second film score, for the German picture Haus der Wünsche, surfaced the same year. Following the disco-inflected single "God Has a Voice, She Speaks Through Me" in May 2008, the pair devoted the remainder of the year to recording. Throughout their 2009 tour they offered the self-released Coconuts, Plenty of Junk Food EP. CocoRosie then shifted to Sub Pop for their fourth album, the more focused and refined Grey Oceans, issued in May 2010; it included a collaboration with Neda Sanai and drew from journeys across Europe, Australia, and South America.

During the 2010s CocoRosie pursued an array of ambitious endeavors. Bianca mounted solo exhibitions of her visual work at multiple New York City galleries, while Sierra joined forces with Amsterdam's Symphony Orchestra and the Sydney Opera House. The 2012 single "We Are on Fire" appeared alongside Bianca's dance-theater piece Nightshift and Sierra's experimental opera Soul Life, composed and performed for Austria's Donau Festival. Reuniting with Sigurðsson and Anohni for 2013's Tales of a Grass Widow, the duo delivered one of their most cohesive collections; that same year they issued the feminist zine Girls Against God and began a sustained collaboration with avant-garde director Robert Wilson. Their score for his Peter Pan production inaugurated further joint works, among them 2015's Pushkin's Fairy Tales, 2017's Edda, and 2019's The Jungle Book. Heartache City in 2015 embraced a stripped-down, acoustic approach that favored musical toys and antique instruments over electronics. Bianca also launched Bianca Casady and the C.i.A., a six-piece ensemble featuring multi-instrumentalists Takuya Nakamura and Doug Wieselman, drummer Lacy Lancaster, pianist Jean-Marc Ruellan, and dancer Bino Sauitzvy; the group released its debut album, Oscar Hocks, in 2016.

CocoRosie's scope kept widening toward the decade's end. They joined Anohni for the politically charged single "Smoke 'Em Out" in 2017. The following year Sierra and Bianca, together with Zakir Hussain and Mahsa Vahdat, appeared with the Kronos Quartet at its 2018 Kronos Festival; the duo returned for the 2019 edition and contributed the track "Roo" to Chance the Rapper's The Big Day. After a five-year absence the Casadys issued Put the Shine On in March 2020. Written and tracked across sites including Hawaii, the beat-centric songs carried CocoRosie's aesthetic to some of its most extreme reaches.