Frankie Cosmos and Fantasy Of A Broken Heart

Album Overview

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.

Greta Kline's Evolving Lyrics

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.

Finding the Past Within

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.

Thematic Exploration

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.

Greta Kline's Influence

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 rigueur, 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 mood boards in major-label marketing offices.

Changes in the Band

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.

Self-Production and Sound

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."

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