Caroline Rose finally releases decade-old single “Yip Yip Yow”

Caroline Rose has spent years playing “Yip Yip Yow” live, but the song is only now getting its first studio release. Written 10 years ago and long part of Rose’s concert set, the rowdy, poppy, psychobilly-leaning track arrives today alongside the launch of their new label, SUCK Records.

Rose was named a Artist To Watch back in 2018, and this new version feels less like a rollout move than a long-delayed document. It opens with the line,

“I was born on the 12th new crescent moon / I was kicking and screaming / A tipped cow in a minivan town.”

The studio cut was produced by John Congleton, who also handled the drum programming, with Carla Azar on live drums and Death Cab’s Zac Rae on bass.

Rose says they imagine the track as if it were being blasted out by “four teenagers in a garage who are equally obsessed with The Gun Club and Britney Spears,” which is as good a shorthand as any for the song’s scrappy collision of influences. There’s a plainness to its title and a cartoonish snap to its feel, but Rose’s own explanation gives it deeper weight: they wrote it about “feeling like I was born in the wrong time, in the wrong place and probably in the wrong body.”

A decade later, the song hasn’t changed so much as finally found the form Rose could live with. “10 years later the only thing that’s different is I finally have a recording of it I like,” they said. The hesitation, by their own account, came from worrying the song was “too simple and nonsensical,” but that has also become part of its appeal. Rose points to a scene of “freaks making two minute songs about rejecting cultures they never really fit into and building their own little worlds instead,” and “Yip Yip Yow” sits squarely in that lineage.