On 27th June 2025, Frankie Cosmos will release their latest long player, Different Talking, available on CD/LP/DSPs worldwide from Sub Pop.
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.
The current configuration of Frankie Cosmos features Greta 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.
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 Katie Von Schleicher. “It’s a rare talent to have, with rare freedom given, and the course hasn’t changed.”
Lead single “Vanity” exemplifies a 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.”
Watch the official video for “Vanity,” which features footage compiled during the recording of Different Talking and filmed by Frankie Cosmos members Greta and Alex. Click here to watch.
Different Talking is now available to pre-order on vinyl/CD/digital formats from Sub Pop. A Loser Edition LP on Opaque Red is available through the Sub Pop Mega Mart (North America) and White Vinyl via the Mega Mart 2 (UK/EU), and your local record store
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 (read full bio at Sub Pop).
North American LOSER
Frankie Cosmos
Different Talking
Album Cover
Tracklisting:
1. Pressed Flower
2. One of Each
3. Against the Grain
4. B***h Heart
5. Porcelain
6. One! Grey! Hair!
7. Vanity
8. Not Long
9. Margareta
10. Your Take On
11. High Five Handshake
12. You Become
13. Joyride
14. Tomorrow
15. Wonderland
16. Life Back
17. Pothole
