Caged Animals is the recording project of songwriter Vincent Cacchione — a Jersey-born, Brooklyn-grown, and Sackville, NB-based artist who has been making music with visual artist Magali Charron for over a decade. The New Yorker once called them a “hip-hop influenced Velvet Underground,” while The Guardian swore they sounded like the perfect band to re-soundtrack Blue Velvet. Together they make character-driven indie-folk that wobble between tenderness, absurdity, and noirish grit. Cacchione cut his teeth at the East Village’s Sidewalk Café, fronting cult favorites Soft Black (with future DIIV leader Zachary Cole Smith) before forming Caged Animals. Along the way he’s collaborated with storytellers like John Cameron Mitchell (Hedwig, Anthem: Homunculus), and produced Larry "Ratso" Sloman’s debut album, which featured Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds and Yasmine Hamdan. Their new record, Make Strange Friends pairs nine character-driven songs with a surrealist radio play, bringing Cacchione's work in song and fiction podcasting into the same frame. Co-produced with Canadian indie mainstay Jon McKiel on his Tascam 388, and out this fall on You’ve Changed Records, the album flickers with the blacklight anxiety of Nebraska, the sepia glow of Deserter’s Songs, and the comic surrealism of Beckett. Its characters — prisoners, addicts, antiheroes, AI monsters, and opiated lovers — stumble through moments of solitude and bursts of connection, all delivered with intimacy, humor, and hope.