Austin’s Duo Dorio Announce New LP & Release Single Video & Tour Dates today
Austin Duo Dorio Announce New Album
Agent Friday & the Perfect Angel
Out July 24 via Earth Libraries
Listen to First Single “My Own Personal Racer”
First single “My Own Personal Racer” also confirms that their sonic influences remain in the mid-’90s and early 2000s, with an unyielding electronic pulse bringing artists like Orbital to mind before the duo’s breezy psych-pop harmonies enter the frame – FLOOD MAGAZINE
3..2..1..Go! The prompt begins and ends the latest Dorio production, starring Agent Friday & the Perfect Angel. Motion-blurred scenes coalesce in an imagined spy thriller soundtrack, cutting across club pop, neo-acoustic, and textured electronica. In eleven jet-setting tracks, the Texas duo reconfigures classic pop sensibilities and cocktail lounge idioms into a thoroughly modern work. The project’s newest LP marks a confident development in Chad Doriocourt and Rachel Rascoe’s co-songwriting and CD-age experimentation. Dorio’s mission starts now.
Fuzz guitars, monophonic synthesizers, and bouncy drum breaks fuel a tale of covert operations on Agent Friday & the Perfect Angel. The album’s propulsive production cuts across a pristine millennium palette, from Madonna’s 1998 Ray of Light all the way to Gorillaz’s 2010 Plastic Beach. Rising to meet the energy of live audiences, Doriocourt’s dance-oriented production amps up Rascoe’s twee singsong melodies. It’s music readymade for both recreational and listening formats.
“Sometimes it’s like I’m the club, and Rachel’s the pop,” says Doriocourt.
“We really leaned into the capacity of pop songwriting to instantly create a fantasy or luxury in an immediate, instinctual way,” says Rascoe. “You can get from point A to point B real fast.”
The concept solidified when the longtime partners separately penned character-driven tracks, “Chasing Agent Friday” and “Perfect Angel,” in accidental alignment. These devilish alter egos, Agent Friday & the Perfect Angel, would guide the album’s double-crossing international espionage. Handoff hooks and turnkey phrases set up the album’s themes of dogged obsession, where chase scenes embody Doriocourt’s experiences with OCD. Intense selects like “My Own Personal Racer, ” out today, drive the narrative: “Leather seats, automatic… turbo speed, dare you to find me.”
“This is the first Dorio album where I’ve ever felt fully emotionally connected to the whole, beyond just the music and production,” says Doriocourt.
The rogue agents are chased by a pair of forthright sleuths, Detectives Marcello and Star, who receive their own interlude themes (“In Marcello’s Obsession” and “Det. Star”). The LP sleeve and videos lay out the cast of doubles, continuing Dorio’s highly integrated visual world. Spy flicks from The Conformist (1970) to So Close (2002) provided glamorous inspiration from across decades. “Maybe it’s this life we wish we had,” says Doriocourt.
The recording process proved why lush lounge-electronica and spy movies have long made a perfect match. Alongside Madonna, soundtracks across the Austin Powers franchise looped in major Dorio touchpoints: Fantastic Plastic Machine and Pizzicato Five, both leaders in the 1990s lounge revival. Rascoe suspects that the album’s recurring devil/angel duality stemmed from Doriocourt’s fanatical playing of FPM’s 1999 “There Must Be An Angel” remix around the house.
“I was looking at the gradient sunglasses Stella McCartney made for Charlie’s Angels, and Chad was ordering these printed Pierre Cardin ties on eBay,” says Rascoe. “We’re always, somewhat unwittingly, on two sides of the same coin.”
In the past year, Dorio has played with like-minded pop projects L’Impératrice, Pearl & the Oysters, and Peel Dream Magazine. For duo sets, Dorio crafted dance-heavy between-song interludes, which garnered an instant reaction. Feedback from new audiences shaped the album’s doubling down on distorted guitar solos and danceable breakbeats. “I started out self-conscious about not having live drums and bass, but seeing people dance to the DJ-type sets ended up being an eye-opener,” says Doricourt.
Doriocourt shaved his head last summer after returning from a West Coast tour, kicking off the streamlined LP process. During the creation of Agent Friday & the Perfect Angel, a post-it note sat on the desk of the duo’s living room studio. The message? “Don’t guild the lily.” The favorite mantra of Madonna, as told to producer William Orbit during the making of Ray of Light, became a formula for Dorio’s merging of electronic and neo-acoustic elements across the album’s sampled soundscape.
“William Orbit does a lot of psychedelic guitar production, which I would do in college bands,” says Doriocourt. “It gave me permission to get back into that. A lot of this album is about embracing what we’re good at and what sounds good to us. No second guessing.”
The project’s fourth LP continues work with the label Earth Libraries. The new album arrives just a year after their previous album, Super Love 3, which Flood Magazine called “an upbeat form of bubblegum-pop and hip-hop percussion that recalls the recent neo-psych output of Stones Throw Records.” During the making of Agent Friday & the Perfect Angel, the duo sent back and forth bulletproof tracks from TLC, Vitamin C, and Natasha Bedingfield. You probably know the ones.
“I came home from seeing a big arena show and told Chad, ‘I want you to send me beats to write over, like a pop star,’” says Rascoe. “This initially offended him, which is funny because that’s ultimately how we ended up making a lot of this. He’d send me an early version of a track, and I’d come up with vocal melodies.”
The recession pop of their youth filters through an alternative lens: The duo crafted the entire album in their Austin home studio, aside from live drumbeats by CJ Eliasen throughout and harmonium by Sowmya Somanath (Plume Girl) on “Perfect Angel.” Billboard-topping influences met Dorio’s jewel case discoveries, mostly out-of-press Swedish compilation discs and the Y2K output of Emperor Norton Records. Alongside such metallic sheen, Rascoe turned to the softer output of 90s avant-pop artists Ivy and Stina Nordenstam.
“I was in the weeds revising some short stories while we were recording, so, with music, I wanted to come up with lyrics and melodies more impulsively,” says Rascoe. “I was inspired by great pop lines that, on their own, are really kind of dry, odd, or overly specific.”
Agent Friday & the Perfect Angel came together a year after Rascoe stepped away from work in newspaper journalism. For the first time, she was tasked with self-managing projects as a writer and musician. Perfectionist ideals merged into the nagging concept of a “Perfect Angel” on her shoulder, “always just out of my reach.” In a similar vein, “New Energy” cheekily requests, “Someone tell me what to do.”
“I was being too rigid around time and the imagined potential of what I could be doing,” says Rascoe. “Perfect Angel is this super-idealized form based on my own interests. I can never reach it.”
Into the same cinematic universe came “Chasing Agent Friday.” Doricourt recalls, “We wrote these two songs separately, but they’re like the exact same idea.” Embodying the album’s interplay of sleekness and chaos, the song pulls from his tumultuous experiences with obsessive-compulsive disorder. In recent years, based on a friend’s recommendation, Doricourt sought diagnosis and treatment for the first time. The labeling of his mental compulsions presented both a helpful discovery and new nemesis, represented by the album’s secret agent.
“For a lot of people with OCD, it’s all in your head. It’s not just about being obsessed with cleaning your room or something,” says Doriocourt. “People perceived me as this happy-go-lucky person, but I always felt like a different person inside of my head, and that’s like the Agent Friday character.”
Across the album, Dorio presents a stylized tale of internal negotiation and double identities. High-speed pursuits meet bold, build-by-letters choruses. Within subtler, acoustic-guitar-driven songs like “Romantic,” Doriocourt’s hushed vocals meet Rascoe’s brighter, emphatic melodies. “International Rolling CR28” reminds of the vulnerability in the multiplayer fantasy, asking, “Do you feel okay, international superstar?”
“You chase it away, but then you realize that it was you all along,” says Doricourt. “Through going to therapy, I realized I was fighting these two sides of myself. The two characters are the same.”
In a series of videos directed by Nick Stoner, the charismatic leads within Dorio’s Agent Friday & the Perfect Angel chase each other around an imagined Austin, driving sports cars and peering through spyglasses. The album’s playful clash of alter egos accents essential pop songwriting and a truly innovative production vision. It’s Dorio’s most intuitive and eclectic work yet. In the end, all the stars and doubles and mirrors of Agent Friday & the Perfect Angel meet face to face, one in the same.
Dorio 2026 Summer Tour – North American Dates
7/13 Denton, TX Rubber Gloves
7/14 Tulsa, OK Thelma’s Peach
7/15 Kansas City, MO The Farewell
7/16 St. Louis, MO The Sinkhole
7/17 Milwaukee, WI Bremen Cafe
7/18 Minneapolis, MN Zhora Darling
7/19 Chicago, IL Cole’s Bar
7/20 Windsor, ON, CA Meteor
7/21 Toronto, ON, CA Dina’s Tavern
7/23 Providence, RI AS220
7/24 Boston, MA O’Brien’s Pub
7/26 NYC, NY Night Club 101
7/28 Indianapolis, IN State Street Pub
7/29 Nashville DRKMTTR
7/30 Birmingham, AL Saturn
7/31 Athens, GA Flicker Theatre
8/1 Atlanta, GA TBA
Photo by: Katherine Squier