Casey Dienel
Casey Dienel, the shape-shifting indie-pop provocateur once known as White Hinterland, is making a triumphant return with My Heart Is an Outlaw, their first album in eight years. Out October 17 via Jealous Butcher, the record marks a bold reentry into a music scene Dienel helped define in the 2010s with experimental pop and boundary-pushing lyrics — this time with even more bite, vulnerability, and wit.
The first taste of the LP arrives in the form of “Your Girl’s Upstairs,” a raw, poetic slice of folk-rock that plays like a queer fever dream — part Springsteen, part My Own Private Idaho. Accompanied by a behind-the-scenes video directed by Alex Basco Koch, the track captures Dienel in the studio, shedding the cocoon of silence that’s surrounded them since 2017’s Imitation of a Woman to Love. That record, released under their own name after retiring White Hinterland, marked a shift toward brutal honesty. With Outlaw, they’re diving even deeper.
“The whole point of my queerness is to live within an alterity, to invent my own future on my own terms,” Dienel explains. “I hate living with people, but I like loving on them. What’s a horny dad to do?”
It’s a quote that feels emblematic of the album’s themes: identity, desire, emotional labor, and the contradictions that make us human. “Your Girl’s Upstairs” features contributions from a veritable indie supergroup — Hand Habits’ Meg Duffy on guitar, Spencer Zahn on bass, Max Jaffe on drums, and Carly Bond of Meernaa on additional guitar. The production is helmed by Adam Schatz (Landlady), with mixing by Jake Aron and mastering by Heba Kadry.
While Dienel’s past work often leaned into lush, layered vocal arrangements and electronic textures, My Heart Is an Outlaw feels more lived-in, rawer — a deliberate shift. This is a record born out of solitude, reckoning, and a radical embrace of queerness as both rebellion and salvation.
“Joy, especially queer joy, is revolutionary,” Dienel says. “Even in the face of everything else, I wanted to show that happiness is still possible — and necessary. The heart has a mind of its own… It’s the thing holding you back that you have to set free on your own time, in your own way.”
Dienel first rose to prominence in the late 2000s as White Hinterland, delivering genre-blurring music that drew comparisons to everyone from Feist to Björk. In 2016, they made headlines for filing — and ultimately losing — a lawsuit against Justin Bieber and Skrillex, claiming the chart-dominating “Sorry” lifted elements from their song “Ring the Bell.” But Outlaw is anything but a footnote or comeback — it’s a reassertion of artistic sovereignty.
“My Heart Is an Outlaw” may sound like a Western, but it plays like a diary set to melody — full of heat, mess, tenderness, and contradiction. Eight years might have passed, but Casey Dienel didn’t just return; they kicked the door open.
Watch “Your Girl’s Upstairs” and see the recording process unfold — and stay tuned for the full album this October.
About the Author
