CocoRosie @ Le Trianon, Paris - May 19th, 2025

For over twenty years, CocoRosie have been filed away in the Freak Folk category. If “freak” implies something strange, spellbinding, and defiantly original, they’re flying that flag higher than ever... but the “folk” has just never made sense. Last year marked two decades of the Casady sisters’ eccentric partnership, and now they return with Little Death Wishes (released in March), their most refined and sonically detailed album yet. A fitting excuse, if you need one, to catch them at Le Trianon, Paris’s velvet-draped opera box of a venue, in a city that has long echoed through their art like a haunted lullaby.

They emerge like surrealist paper dolls brought to life—layers of makeup, prosthetics, costumes, and theatrical oddities creating a kind of wounded cabaret fantasy. Imagine BRAT summer curated by Tom Waits and you wouldn't be far off. But don’t let the glam-goth, broken-Barbie aesthetic fool you: the music is what matters here. Joined by a string quartet, a drummer, and a keyboardist, Rose and Bianca guided the audience through their shadowy wonderland of sound, with Little Death Wishes understandably taking center stage.

For all their conceptual cohesion, CocoRosie remain gloriously musically unhinged—and that’s the magic. They look like they sound: a stitched-together collage of clashing eras and offbeat influences, a sonic Frankenstein in lace gloves. Chamber music haunts the edges, hip-hop beats slip in sideways, lo-fi folk mutters beneath glossy dance-pop glimmers, all laced with avant-garde whimsy. Their stage production mirrors the music perfectly—a living, breathing mood board of the beautiful and the bizarre. And as strange, oblique, dark, and defiantly experimental as they get, CocoRosie never forget the thrill of performance. Beneath all the art and artifice, they’re having a blast—and the audience, dancing start to finish, is right there with them.