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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. Its 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 musics 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 were 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 its 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, its 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.This is Frankie Cosmoss first entirely self-produced album (aside from Klines 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 Ive wanted to make since I was a teenager, says Kline. Although this was recorded in a living room, its as high fidelity as anything weve made in the studio.
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