Caroline Rose Finally Releases “Yip Yip Yow,” a Decade-Old Song About Not Fitting Anywhere

Caroline Rose has finally released a studio version of “Yip Yip Yow,” a song they wrote 10 years ago and have been performing live for years. The new single arrives today alongside the launch of their new label, SUCK Records, giving a long-circulating track its first official home at a moment when Rose is clearly thinking about what gets preserved, and what takes too long to surface.

We named Rose an Artist To Watch back in 2018, but “Yip Yip Yow” reaches further back than that. It’s a rowdy, poppy, psychobilly-leaning cut that opens with Rose’s deadpan, off-kilter couplet: “I was born on the 12th new crescent moon / I was kicking and screaming/ A tipped cow in a minivan town.” The studio version was produced by John Congleton, who also handled the drum programming. Carla Azar plays live drums, and Death Cab’s Zac Rae is on bass. Rose imagines the track as if it were being played by “four teenagers in a garage who are equally obsessed with The Gun Club and Britney Spears,” which is as neat a frame as any for its strange mix of jolts and hooks.

For Rose, though, the song has always been less about precision than release. In a note accompanying the single, they say they wrote “Yip Yip Yow” about feeling like they were born “in the wrong time, in the wrong place and probably in the wrong body.” A decade later, they add, “the only thing that’s different is I finally have a recording of it I like.” That delay says something about the song itself, but also about the kind of material Rose is drawn to now: small, fast songs that reject the cultures they never quite fit into and build a world of their own instead. “I think what’s taken me so long to put it out is a fear of how simple and nonsensical it is,” they write, before turning toward the kind of rough-edged, two-minute freak-pop they say they love hearing elsewhere.