‘Different Talking’ by Frankie Cosmos: Making your 20s a little more bearable
The new album is full of seventeen relatable tracks.
Photo: Pooneh Ghana
New York-based Frankie Cosmos will release their sixth studio album, Different Talking, this Friday, June 27th. The album is set to release following the two lead singles and subsequent videos for Vanity and Bitch Heart, which were released earlier this month. Through its seventeen tracks, the album discusses early adulthood and all of the directionlessness and questioning that comes with it.
The album opens with Pressed Flowers, a track that exemplifies all of the ways in which Frankie Cosmos has grown through their past six albums. At under two minutes, Pressed Flowers uses Greta Kline’s soothing and optimistic vocals to talk about mundane and universal early adulthood. Being trapped between long train rides, tiring relationships, and dead-end jobs. This track opens up a simultaneous explanation and escape from everyday problems, leading into the rest of the album and all of the expressions of reality that are to come with the line “I will never love you again / I can’t even remember when.”
One of Each presents a metaphor similar to Sylvia Plath’s fig tree, expressing a desire to choose more than one possible life with the line “I still don’t know what I want / I’ll take one of each”. The following track, Against the Grain, is a simpler and more sombre song about loneliness and feeling weird and out of place in a city full of people. The end of the track features a hypnotic musical coda resembling the sound of a subway and the feeling of being alone on the weekends.
The album’s fourth track and second single, Bitch Heart, steadily builds from mourning the boredom of childhood to resenting boredom in adulthood. The following track, Porcelain, combines themes of safety and fragility with an electric guitar solo that adds a sort of angry depth to this portion of the album. With tracks like these, the band presents the constant and coexisting duality of annoyance at the world and the need to soak it all in.
Photo: Pooneh Ghana
One! Grey! Hair!, in addition to being the best titled track on the album, uses lines like “time is both frozen and moving faster than we can see” to vent about the joys and anxiety of ageing. The punctuation of the title reflects its use in the track, with a heavy drum beat interrupting between each word. The track is followed by Vanity, in which the band plays with a more fun and upbeat piano and drum combination, rather uncharacteristic of the rest of the album. The highlight of this track is the repeating and sometimes overlapping lines “I hate it here / I know”, which recur throughout the song.
Not Long, true to its name, is only a minute and a half in length. With a much darker and heavier beat, the track sets itself apart to act as an interlude connecting the two halves of the album. The track leads into Margareta, which is named after a mysterious, cool girl, and employs a groovy electric guitar outro to match.
The rock-centric portion of the album continues with Your Take On, a retro track in the vein of 90s girl bands and French rock like Téléphone. Your Take On follows the inner monologue behind being treated poorly. The chorus of the song uses the title to reason with betrayal, saying, “I know it’s not your fault / It must have been a lot to take on”. High Five Handshake, the album’s longest track, immediately follows. Slowing down to create a false sense of child-like simplicity, the track is drenched with imagery of childhood friendship, sitting on sidewalks, and having the time and headspace to take in all that surrounds us.
The quiet reflecting tone of the previous track continues into You Become. Similar to Your Take On, You Become grapples with the loneliness, bitter sadness, and eventual acceptance of losing a friend: “You said how could you ever stop being friends?/ That you’d never stop loving them/ I guess that rule doesn’t apply to me”. The mood lightens with Joyride, the album’s 13th track, which lightens the sound and the mood with themes of moving on.
In the final section of the album, the summer stand-out track Tomorrow will undoubtedly make its way into a movie soundtrack. Greta Kline’s vocals mixed with the relaxed beat come together to perfectly illustrate the acceptance that things like dream jobs often aren’t the dream you expected.
Track fifteen, Wonderland, brings a vibrancy and energy to the album’s ending that is entirely unexpected. A tribute to growing older and loving more wisely after getting hurt, told through the lens of a rose-coloured look into the future.
The album ends with Life Back and Pothole, promising a resolution for the future: living life with more of the childhood wonder that was lost through the stress and chaos of growing into adulthood. The latter ends the album with the reminder to live freely without comparison to others, leaving a positive tone on an album equally as long and emotional as your 20s feel.
Different Talking is out now via Sub Pop Records.