Frankie Cosmos

Different Talking, the sixth and, so far, best album by NYC indie-rock four-piece Frankie Cosmos, seems to exist across time and space, as we all kind of do. It’s a collection of fragments and memories, remembered places, and reinterpreted feelings that adds up to a lucent, humming whole: a sturdy, worldly indie-rock record about aging and the passage of time that nonetheless manages to feel sharply current.

Frankie Cosmos lead singer, guitarist, and songwriter Greta Kline has long been heralded as one of contemporary indie music’s most deft and most necessary writers, but on Different Talking, her lyrics soften out slightly, the wry cynicism that defined recent records now giving way to an acknowledgment of the awesome, and necessary, fallibility of the human brain and heart.

To classify Different Talking as a return to form, or at least a return to the lush directness of earlier Frankie Cosmos records, would be rude but also wholly incorrect: as Different Talking makes clear, you can never return to the comfort and bravery of your early twenties, but that person always kind of lives inside you, no matter how much you change. Different Talking is about finding that person, honoring them, and learning from them. “A lot of the album is about being grown up and figuring out how to know yourself – like, ‘What is moving on?’” says Kline. “How do we move on when we’re addicted to a cycle of haunting our own past? Writing songs is just the way through that.”

Kline has been a fixture of the American indie underground since her late teens when her prolific Bandcamp releases and 2014 indie-label debut Zentropy led her to be dubbed “the poet laureate of New York City DIY.” A tag like that is a lot for young shoulders to take on, but it’s hard to deny the singular influence she has had on contemporary pop music. If the idea of a young woman picking up a synth in her bedroom, putting a couple of songs on the internet, and quickly becoming a superstar is now de rigeur, it’s because Kline – along with a handful of other artists and writers – normalized and exalted ideas of (female) DIY genius long before they were pinned to moodboards in major-label marketing offices.

A lot has changed since then: after going through a handful of different permutations over the past decade, Frankie Cosmos is now a four-piece featuring Kline, Alex Bailey, Katie Von Schleicher, and Hugo Stanley. Kline is the only constant, but Stanley, Bailey, and Von Schleicher are crucial collaborators, and to use the names “Greta Kline” and “Frankie Cosmos” interchangeably would be incorrect. Kline remains the primary songwriter, and the music on Different Talking is arranged by the band as a whole, but this is the first album to be self-tracked by the unit with no external studio producers.

Setting up camp at a house in upstate New York for a month-and-a-half to work on Different Talking, Frankie Cosmos developed the kind of rapport you can only build from living and breathing your art for a long period; they smoothed out kinks in production together and watched films in the evenings, cooked for each other while one member ironed out their parts alone, and took trips into town when they needed a matcha or a breather. Learning each others’ rhythms meant that, with each successive day, they were becoming more of a living, breathing organism as a band, less a collection of musicians building out Kline’s songs than a unit devoted to finding a shared world within each track. This is Frankie Cosmos’s first entirely self-produced album (aside from Kline’s early demos), and, not coincidentally, it feels like a purer, more distilled take on the band. “It does feel like the best version of what I’ve wanted to make since I was a teenager,” says Kline. “Although this was recorded in a living room, it’s as high fidelity as anything we’ve made in the studio.”

This sense of locked-in-ness is clear when you listen to Different Talking, which could only be the work of four accomplished, ambitious musicians working in perfect harmony. Bailey’s antic bass line interlocks seamlessly with Stanley’s syncopated rhythm on “Bitch Heart”; Von Schleicher’s keys perfectly gild Kline’s vocal melody on “One! Gray! Hair!”. Throughout the album, it feels like nothing is extraneous or out of place, everything being controlled from one shared central nervous system. Lyrically, Different Talking may be some of Kline’s most insular work, but musically, it’s the most varied and richly textured Frankie Cosmos album, filled with country-fried noodling and tassels of synth and imposing walls of sound. “We’d go to any length to get Greta’s songs right, and she’s generous with songs, so we have a lot of freedom to arrange them,” says Von Schleicher. “It’s a rare talent to have, with rare freedom given, and the course hasn’t changed.”

Lead single “Vanity” exemplifies this perfectionist’s approach to production and songwriting: Von Schleicher correctly describes it as “a fucking pop anthem”, but does a pop anthem ever contain this much attention to detail? “Vanity” is spare and busy at the same time, its second-album-Strokes chorus blossoming between passages of minimalist curiosity that recall the earliest Frankie Cosmos tapes. It’s one of the songs on Different Talking that doesn’t have a clear object, perhaps a result of its genesis: “I started writing it one evening while I walked (~6.5 miles) from Tompkins Square Park to Sunset Park, speaking directly to the universe and pleading to be considered by it,” says Kline. “It feels like it encompasses this push and pull between adult and kid, government and governed, planet and blade of grass.”

Different Talking opens with “Pressed Flower,” a kind of Rosetta Stone for the rest of the record that touches on gentrification and rebirth, the passage of time, and the idea of “memories being present in the physical world,” says Kline. Wistful but resolute, it perfectly encapsulates Kline’s writing at this moment: Hopeful and world-weary at the same time, looking back on painful older memories with a new sense of resignation and understanding. “I’m constantly both shedding old feelings and reactivating them through the same process of reflection,” says Kline. “I’m looking back at my younger self and feeling both connected and disconnected from her in new ways.”

Sometimes, that sense of connection comes in the ability to make a joke about something traumatic, like when Kline sings “My wonderland keeps the score” on “Wonderland”; you can feel a sense of relief on “Life Back” when she sings that “Yesterday I felt like I would never have my life back/Today I don’t remember ever feeling like that.” Although dissociation is a theme of Different Talking (“Trick my body, near constantly,” sings Kline on “Porcelain”), so is the uncomfortable euphoria of feeling totally embodied. Being aware of yourself becomes an insistent hook on “Bitch Heart”: “I’m watching the goosebumps retract/Watch the hair fall flat against my skin.” “So much of aging for me has involved this growing awareness and learning to be in my body and feel grounded,” says Kline. “I want to try and take in each moment with more focus and thoughtfulness – sometimes that means focusing on a physical body sensation.”

Different Talking ends with “Pothole,” a jaunty, dryly funny obliteration of ego that ends on the kind of ambiguous, optimistic note that’s defined many a Frankie Cosmos song over the years: “It’s sunset here/What’s it for you?/How’d they get the pink light to come out like that?” It’s an invitation and an acknowledgment that the world is just the way that it is, and it’s our job to find meaning within that, as opposed to waiting for meaning to come find us. “It’s kind of like, okay, the world is big and can be beautiful,” says Kline. “Let’s ask questions about it.”