Music Crowns is proud to premiere “Your Girl’s Upstairs”, the fierce and fearless new single from Massachusetts-based producer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist Casey Dienel. It’s the first glimpse into their forthcoming seventh album, My Heart Is An Outlaw, due later this year — and it signals a thrilling new chapter for an artist known for constant reinvention.
Renowned for their vivid lyricism, genre-fluid production, and shape-shifting pop instincts, Dienel pushes even further with this latest offering — a deeply personal, sonically daring track that explores autonomy, queerness, and emotional labour with clarity, cool defiance, and melodic bite.
“Your Girl’s Upstairs” opens with a hypnotic percussive loop and unfolds into a lush, layered soundscape anchored by meg duffy’s (Hand Habits) unmistakable guitar work, alongside contributions from Spencer Zahn (bass) and Max Jaffe (drums). It’s a roadhouse reverie full of contradiction — seductive yet cutting, loose yet deliberate. “It grins knowingly and keeps walking,” Dienel says of the track, which walks the line between kiss-off and catharsis.
The chorus delivers one of the song’s sharpest stings: “She played house, played dead, played anything to keep your head from crying.” It’s a lyric that slices through the noise — a moment of clarity delivered with both tenderness and punch.
“I’m not a domesticated creature,” Dienel explains. “During lockdown, it felt like everyone was ENM or poly or GGG — but still playing out the most toxic hetero main character storylines. These unreconciled contradictions inside duel it out, but neither wins. I am all of them: an incorrigible flirt, a romantic, a cranky homebody, and an unapologetic perv.”
My Heart Is An Outlaw will mark Dienel’s first full-length release in eight years — and notably, their first album recorded entirely in a studio setting. Co-produced with Adam Schatz (Japanese Breakfast, Neko Case), the album was crafted in Los Angeles, New York, and Vermont, featuring an all-star cast including Carly Bond (Meernaa), meg duffy, Spencer Zahn, and Max Jaffe, with post-production by Jake Aron (Solange, Snail Mail) and Heba Kadry (Björk, Sade).
Influenced by the dreamlike tension of My Own Private Idaho and the widescreen pop drama of Born in the U.S.A., the album trades perfectionism for emotional connection, capturing queer love, freedom, memory, and the unruly nature of the heart.
“The heart has a mind of its own,” Dienel says. “It’s the thing holding you back that you have to set free on your own time, in your own way.”
Over the past two decades, Dienel has carved a singular lane in independent music, both under their own name and as White Hinterland, earning acclaim from Rolling Stone, NME, and Spin. Now, with My Heart Is An Outlaw, they return fully reimagined — and “Your Girl’s Upstairs” is just the beginning.
