American duo Casi have shared new single ‘Jumper’, the latest preview of their self-titled debut album, due 19th June via Carpark Records.
Eli Edwards and Xayvien Young grew up together in Spanaway, Washington: a small military-base town south of Tacoma in the Pacific Northwest. Edwards will be familiar to fans of Enumclaw, the acclaimed Tacoma rock band whose 2022 debut Save The Baby drew widespread critical attention and whose 2024 follow-up Home In Another Life cemented their reputation as one of the most vital guitar acts to emerge from the region in years. Casi operates in an entirely different register: where Enumclaw deals in surging, arena-aimed rock, Casi pulls emo, underground hip-hop, left-field electronics and straight-up punk into the same room and finds what happens when none of them are asked to behave.
‘Jumper’ has its roots in a specific, bruising experience: Edwards and Young had been due to play their first show in Los Angeles when ICE activity around the city led to a curfew that shut the gig down. What followed was a day spent driving through a city under pressure, watching scenes of state force that neither could shake off. “
We were on the freeway and a squad of ten cop cars flew by filled with four guys with ARs,” Edwards has said of the experience, “and we’re all thinking, for what? They were putting people’s grandparents in cuffs and kids getting tear gassed. It just was all so dehumanising.” The track’s feral sonics, somewhere between AFX electronics and the hardcore fury of Turnstile, carry all of that charge directly. This is not a song that processes its anger at a safe distance.
The self-titled album promises more of the same volatility across its full runtime, drawing loose comparisons to Death Grips and Soul Glo in its refusal to settle. It arrives via Carpark Records, the Washington DC independent that has built its reputation on exactly this kind of left-field signing, counting Beach House, Toro y Moi and Cloud Nothings among its alumni. For two people who have known each other since childhood, Casi sound like a band who have spent a long time working out exactly what they want to say, and have now decided to say it at volume.
Casi is out 19th June via Carpark Records.
