Case Oats

Casey Gomez Walker, who named her band Case Oats in memoriam of a late hamster, is a vivid and pointed storyteller, whether she is spinning verses from the pages of her own life or writing from the reels of late-night television. On Last Missouri Exit, her 2025 full-length debut for Merge Records, Oats wrote of a vagabond couple who stole a plane in hopes of making an escape to Mexico, only to crash in the bottom of a Montana lake, a modern-day murder ballad wrested from Dateline. But much of Last Missouri Exit stems from her experience in the small-town Midwest, where she suffered through marching band, allegations of Satanism, and, it seems from her songs, a string of friends who did not make the same escape to Chicago. “You imagined using again/I lost touch with my best friend,” she sings on the brilliant “Bluff,” an alt-country anthem that pulses with unexpected post-punk tension. “Your foot in your mouth and mine out the door.”

Case Oats itself emerged from a sort of bluff. In 2018, when a friend asked Walker if she could headline a hometown show, the band was more of an idea than an entity, with a single but no real lineup. Walker and her partner and drummer, Spencer Tweedy, steadily built a stellar band, though, with bassist Jason Ashworth, guitarist Max Subar, and fiddler Scott Daniel able to push their Bloodshot-style country-rock into unexpected shapes. The band cut the core of Last Missouri Exit in the basement of a house shared by members during three hot August days, playing the songs with an immediacy that reflected and augmented Walker’s sharp writing. It is, though, only a start: As the summer of 2026 arrived, Walker and Tweedy released “Bottom of an Afternoon,” a homespun song of drum machines and muted trumpets that, though about the low points of grief, suggested bold possibilities for the project’s future.