Cosmo’s Midnight on their new album ‘Stop Thinking Start Feeling’
New music about crushing on someone super hard, but being too scared to say how you feel (have we all been there?). French disco influences. The importance of genuine human connection and friendship in songwriting and collaboration. Mezcal Palomas. Going on tour in the UK, Europe & New Zealand. And more.
Fuzzer: How's it going? How have you guys been?
Pat: Yeah, not too bad! We just started working on some new music. We’ve got a bit of downtime at the moment so we want to do a bit of writing.
Fuzzer: Amazing! First off, how did you get started in production and making music and all that?
Pat: Basically, we have an older brother and we were just really impressionable younger brothers, so we would kind of just copy everything he would do. Whether that was like getting into skating or he did breaking for a little bit, break dancing, and then basketball. So we were just copying everything he was doing, and then eventually he gave DJing a go, and he was getting this software called Ableton that everyone is pretty familiar with these days. And yeah, I just had a crack at it and got hooked on it. And then Cos was kind of like watching me do it, and he had a go at it as well. He used to make little mash ups and stuff. And then it just sort of became this addiction through high school, and then we won a remix competition, and then the rest is history up until now (laughs)
Fuzzer: How good, that's so awesome! And did you have any main musical or creative influences growing up?
Pat: I feel like everyone back when we were starting everyone had the same influences. I feel like everyone was looking at French music, so it was like Daft Punk, Justice and the sort of surrounding French DJs at the time. So we were learning a lot about things like sampling. We learnt that Daft Punk were dipping into disco and music from another era to write their own stuff, and that was like a real eye opening moment for us. So I think that was how we got started, really listening to that music. And it spiraled from there into writing all different genres and just learning, trying to soak up as much stuff as possible really.
Fuzzer: Nice! And congrats on the new album. It sounds so good! How does it feel to have that world?
Pat: Thank you. It was a long time coming. So I think we were really anxious to see how people felt about these songs. I feel like we did a slightly smaller album because we wanted to really hone in on a specific sound.
Cos: Keep it lean and mean.
Pat: And I think also conceptually, we wanted to keep it pretty tight. Like the whole album concept like “Stop Thinking Start Feeling”. We wanted to make sure that every song kind of hit that in it’s own special way and we didn't want it to overstay.
Cos: And drag in any way.
Pat: So it feels really good to get it out there and most importantly, go on the road and finally play shows. We haven't done a headline tour since 2019, so playing around Australia and America and seeing people respond to it face to face is invaluable. So it's what makes it worth it. We put out our last album “Yesteryear” in 2020 and we didn't get to tour it, so it was kind of a little bit sad not really getting that chance to get the immediate reaction from everyone.
Cos: Like you can gauge what people think based on comments or like “we got X amount of plays on Spotify, that's really good”. But it's not as tangible as playing to a crowd that are having a great time.
Pat: The best thing was, these songs that we'd put out in COVID, when we were in America, people were like “Oh, this was my COVID album” and people were singing along to it. We really didn't expect that (laughs). So it was really awesome to see that we managed to connect to people just through the music alone, and then dropping this new album, then touring that as well. It's really cool to see that our previous album sort of bridged that gap, and then now we've been able to come back with our third album and really just bring something new. So I just feel honestly thankful that we made it through it.
Fuzzer: Oh yeah, absolutely. COVID was definitely a tough time for everyone, so for people to have great music to listen to during that time, just to get them through those tough days, I think that was important. And one of our favourite tracks from this project is “Bang My Line” featuring Tkay Maidza. Can you tell us a little bit about the concept of that one?
Cos: That track was kind of birthed by the love of a song. We really love “Electric Feel” by MGMT and we were kind of listening to that a lot and going “what makes a song so interesting?”. Obviously, it's in a different time signature but it just hit so many key things that I love about music. It's added to the list of songs I wish I wrote, and we were like trying to capture the energy of a timeless track, kind of bridging different eras - some psychedelic elements, some funk, and then rap obviously, and then our own production and kind of combining them altogether to make something that sounded pretty distinct and fresh to us.
Pat: Yeah, and I think what made it interesting was that we joined up with Winston Surfshirt to actually write this one. So we were at his house, he had a really nice house up on a hill. It was kind of like an LA style, cool with cactuses and stuff, but up in the northern beaches. It was this really sunny day, and we were just really feeling like this sort of West Coast groove on the drums. I wrote the chorus, which is like the “Bang My Line” thing, and he picked up on that and wrote this whole first verse about crushing on someone super hard, but being too scared to say how you feel. So you're kind of hoping that they're going to hit you up first and solve that problem for you. You're kind of just trying to beam out good vibes and hoping that they’re going to pick it up (laughs). Winston's vocals just worked really well for me to sing so I picked up on that and just had a go at it. The song just immediately had this great flow.
And then we hit up Tkay Maidza who was living in LA at the time, but we'd been chatting a whole bunch - we wanted to write together for ages and said “we think this song is a great fit”. She just came back like a day later with this rap verse freestyle that she'd come up with. And we said “this is perfect”. And it was basically finished after that point. It's one of those songs that just felt pretty effortless to be honest. There's a few songs on the album that were a lot more work, but this one was not one of them. It was just really free flowing and fun.
Fuzzer: So good! Yeah, and you've actually got a ton of collaborators on this album. So how do those normally come about?
Cos: Yeah, it's different every time. Tkay was very organic because we've known each other for years. And some of the other tracks, we reached out to them over the internet, like Instagram or friends of friends. Tkay also put us in touch with Kyle Dion for our song ‘After Hours’. And so that was really nice. We were just in LA and she was like “Oh, you got to hit him up while you guys here”. He's an amazing singer, like, a real kind of an old school voice. He's speaks very quietly, and you can hear in his music, he's got an amazing falsetto. He's just got such a character.
Pat: He sounds like he would have been in the era of like MJ and Prince.
Cos: Yeah, he’s like a modern version of that, very cool. For some of the other tracks, we were just writing over in London, and we just kind of put feelers out. One of them was with Franc Moody who are amazing producers, who feel like are kind of our kindred spirits musically. They make a lot of disco and funk, and they're influenced by that a lot, and they've really honed their craft. Like writing in the studio, they are like one take wonders - just bang it out. And it's so cool to watch, because me and Pat, we like to chip away and combine and combine and make textures and stuff.
Pat: I think the thing that made this album feel really fresh for us was that a lot of these features were just that. It was just like, kind of happening on people and like stumbling on these friends of friends. It was very natural. It wasn't like these cold emails to each other, where we'd done that in previous albums. It was like this really dry email thread back and forth, and this was like most of them were written in the room together. So I feel like you really get that feeling of like, freshness and immediacy that you get from writing a song with someone on the day. Almost all these songs we started and conceptualized them with the artists we were working with in the room. So I feel like that is something that we really value, being able to kind of chat to them and just become friends. It's kind of bit like speed dating or something, like you want to go in there and just really put some feelers out and see how you connect with each other. Sometimes it bangs on real well and you just start writing, and sometimes it's a little bit cold or you're not quite fitting together, and you still write something but you kind of know that it might not pan out. So I think it is weird how important the human connection is in writing a good song. I think it's really hard to be clinical about it. It's really like friendship and emotional and it's all about connection.
Cos: Yeah, we often just sit there and listen to music for a couple hours.
Pat: We’re like “what do you like listening to?” and you just try to get an image of what they like. And I think something we do when we work with someone is we try to really meet in the middle. We're not trying to force them into our lane. We want it to be very much like a meeting of our styles. So we want them to bring as much of their identity and their workflow and their palette into our world, and then we'll put our skin on it.
Working with spill tab for example, absolute wizard. She did an incredible job at coming to our style because she does these more like indie rock/pop, they even have a grungy twinge. We kind of met in the middle, but she just was able to effortlessly write this vocal over our song. She actually came to our studio in 2022 while she was in Sydney and she just sat at the computer, and we sat on the couch in the other end of the room and just watched her. She just recorded everything and produced it all - she just did everything (laughs). We didn't have to do a single thing. She just picked the whole thing up. And then she was like “Oh, let me sit with this for a bit” and then went back to LA. She put all these extra synths on it - it's like she was just in our brain, she just knew exactly what sounds, what melodies and harmonies to do. She's an absolute pro - I would love to work with her again. Yeah, that was one of the songs that just felt like we had this really cool idea. I'm like “wow, where's it going?”. And then she was really just the missing piece to that song, like she picked up on it and just took it somewhere that we didn't expect.
Cos: That we wanted but we never could have thought of.
Pat: It’s just one of the best feelings. It really makes you realize what the potential of music is when you have someone bring something to a song that is so unexpected, different to what you would do. It’s really refreshing because sometimes I feel like when you've got your own bag of tricks, you can get a bit tired of it. Having someone sort of really shake it up just really makes you realize how much there is out there still. It’s really motivating and inspiring.
Fuzzer: Yeah! I was gonna ask you what one of your main highlights was making the album, that seems like it's one of them. Did you have any other core memories during the album writing process?
Cos: I just really loved the time we had off overseas and in Australia to write. In the conceptualization era, we were kind of banging our heads on a wall until we found what we wanted. But it was just such a cool time to be writing so much music. We churned out so many songs.
Pat: And post COVID, being able to write a lot of this album actually overseas and in different places. We were in East London for a good two weeks writing this album, and then we were in LA for three weeks writing the album. I feel like just being in those spaces, I can kind of imagine them when I listen to the songs, and I feel like this sort of sense of place of where we are always kind of leaks into our music a little bit. I feel like we always like to go somewhere to write, We often do write at home, but on all our albums, I feel like we've had some moment in time where we've gone to like a beach house or like up onto a mountain somewhere, and just try to really like soak in the feeling of being in a new place and bring that into the music.
Cos: It's just like getting out of the mental cobwebs of being at home. And then you just go somewhere, and you set up and you put it like in a nice area, like looking out the window, and you're like “alright” and you kind of just sit there and wait, and then it hits you and you bang it out.
Pat: It's natural to sort of want to be in a space that shifts your perspective.
Cos: I mean, people have been doing that since the beginning of time.
Pat: Like Gauguin went to Polynesia to paint (laughs)
Fuzzer: Yes, love that! So for each of our interviews, we're gonna to customize a cocktail recipe in relation to the album or project we're talking about. So if this album was a cocktail, what kind of flavors do you think you would bring into it?
Cos: Yeah I would make it like a Mezcal Paloma, like grapefruit, soda and some kind of bitters in there too could be nice. And then, yeah, really good.
Pat: You could put some kind of orange-y, citrus-y liqueur to sweeten the top of it a little bit. And then use grapefruit juice and soda instead of grapefruit soda.
Cos: I love cocktails.
Pat: Yeah we love cocktails. Our friend went to Vietnam and he got us this yuzu sake, and it tastes so good with tonic.
Cos: I'd have that with Campari and Prosecco as well.
Pat: Yeah I agree though, that’s the cocktail - it’s the colour scheme (laughs). A Mezcal Paloma served in a terracotta jar, like the way you do it in Mexico. They get like terracotta cups and they put them in the fridge so they're ice cold and then they serve them. Paloma’s have got to me one of my favourite cocktails of all time (laughs). It’s so refreshing. Because the songs are so summery and bright and fun, I don't think it would be anything like a Negroni or something.
Cos: Nah they’re too serious. They’re refreshing as well but they’re a bit too much alcohol.
Fuzzer: I love that answer! Okay I'm gonna put together a recipe for that. And what music are you listening to at the moment? Do you have any new artists that we should listen to?
Pat: Well we’ve being doing a bit of writing with some Australian DJs at the moment. We've been working with this young gun who’s from Tasmania originally. His name's Sam Alfred, and he makes sort of 90s, sort of progressive house and it is just so much fun. It's crazy how much of a resurgence like the 90s is having culturally at the moment and and in music. So I feel like we've been listening to a lot of turn of the millennium sort of dance music as inspiration at the moment. Not really new artists. It's more we're listening to a lot of older stuff.
Cos: But we’ve also been listening to the mk.gee album which is really good.
Pat: Yeah “Two Star & The Dream Police”
Cos: I’ve been listening to L'Impératrice. They're like a kind of French loungy disco, but with cool pop vocals, like crossover French disco pop.
Pat: Yeah, I’m listening to this guy from Vienna, his name's salute. I'm listening to the new album, it's called “TRUE MAGIC”, and it's a lot of fun. It samples Japanese kind of like soul/funk fusion, this band called Cassiopeia, and it’s just jumping over so many genres.
Pat: And I think it’s really refreshing to see people taking a lot of liberties and like risks with their music, and not being too worried to be like “Well, I have to sound this certain way”. I feel like they just trust that they have this undercurrent that people can come to and know it's them. I feel like I’ve been listening to a lot of DJ sets, like there's a DJ called Octo Octa and they do vinyl DJ sets. I love watching that craft, it’s such a crazy skill to have.
Cos: And I feel like people that are really deep into the vinyl DJing, they're always old heads, like they're encyclopedias of music. They're pulling out the most obscure but cool stuff. It's so frustrating because I'm sitting there trying to ID tracks, and there's just no chance. But her sets are so cool. They bridge 40 years of music, and they're always so exciting and fresh. It's so cool when you listen to music from 40 years ago and you're like “that sounds newer than anything I've ever heard in the last five years”. It makes me really excited, like I need to go back and dig through all this stuff because there’s got to be some gems.
Pat: And then weirdly when we were doing our Australia tour, we had DJs open for us at every show, and they completely understood the vibe that we needed. At the Brisbane show, in the green room they had a speaker that was playing what was coming off the main stage, and I just had my phone next to it Shazamming everything (laughs). The DJ’s name was Squidgenini, and she absolutely crushed it. She had a great time too. She's like “Oh, that was one of the funnest crowds I've played to”. We were asking our booking agent to get some people who can play disco and funk, but in a sort of unexpected way, and they absolutely smashed it. It was a lot of fun.
Fuzzer: Yeah that sounds so amazing! And then you're getting out on tour soon in the UK and Europe which is exciting. What are you looking forward to most about those performances?
Cos: For me, it's kind of going to be a lot of the travelling. I've never been to some of these countries. I've never been to Spain.
Pat: We haven't been outside of London so I think other parts of the UK like up to Bristol, Leeds and Manchester I think. We’re basically doing most of it in a car, so we're doing a lot of driving which I think is the funnest way to see a country because you really get a sense of place and scale. Whereas if you're flying everywhere, it can sort of feel a bit homogenous. It's so weird, the feeling of flying somewhere totally foreign. But airports everywhere are kind of the same and you see the same chains of fast food and stuff. It sort of ends up blurring everything together. And I think when you're driving between places, you kind of really appreciate the difference.
Cos: We’re also going to A Coruña which is like the very tippy top of Spain, which I'm really excited for. You can't even fly there - you have to go to Barcelona or Madrid first. There and Barcelona. I'm really excited for Spain. I've never really been to Europe. So yeah, I'm just looking forward to the travel and meeting fans and countries we've never been to.
Fuzzer: And you’ve just announced your New Zealand shows as well! What are you most excited for, for those shows?
Pat: We've got a few friends over there, but when it's good weather in Auckland and Welly as well, it's just so gorgeous.
Cos: I think New Zealand is just one of the most beautiful countries in the world.
Pat: We drove down from Auckland to New Plymouth and that was like a six hour drive, but not because it was like a long distance. It was just so windy, and the view and the drive going down the mountain to the coast was one of the most gorgeous views we've ever had. And we're all like huge Lord of the Rings fans so we went to Hobbiton as well and did the tour (laughs).
Cos: New Zealand’s one of those countries where I feel like I can’t help but have so much serotonin just being out and about. It's just such an interesting country to be in and look at and then the cities are beautiful. I love New Zealand.
Pat: We haven't done that much time in New Zealand but we went to Queenstown to play Rhythm & Alps. I think it's just the driving around and being in those areas. But very keen to come back and do some headline shows and show everyone how the album sounds live.
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