Getting Candid with Cosmo’s Midnight [INTERVIEW]
We’re getting candid in our interview with Cosmo’s Midnight.
Cosmo’s Midnight is the Australian twin duo Cosmo and Patrick Liney who bring grooves and electronic music together. Their third studio album Stop Thinking and Start Feeling was written between Sydney, London, and LA, featuring collaborators like Franc Moody, spill tab, Tkay Maidza and more.
We talk to Cosmo and Patrick about how the duo dug into the nostalgia of music from their childhood to find inspiration for their third album, their goal to make uplifting music, regardless of what they’re going through in their personal lives, and how they use dance music as an escape from the world to just feel.
Listen to the full interview with Cosmo’s Midnight on Name 3 Songs podcast and find a transcribed excerpt below.
Name 3 Songs: your third studio album, Stop Thinking, Start Feeling, was inspired by this nostalgia for the music that you loved growing up as kids. What about this nostalgia, like kind of, sorry, what about tapping into this nostalgia allowed you to explore new sounds that you otherwise might not have?
Cosmo’s Midnight: I feel like the main thing about this album was trying to write music that felt effortless, but also nostalgic when we listened to it. So a big part of it was listening to as much music as we could and finding what was the through line that will make it kind of nostalgic and will last all these years. And we found there’s a lot of common threads and some of it was that it was music that was sampled. Some of it was music that ended up being in samples and we’re trying to find just anything that felt like it had been lived in.
So we were trying to write music that felt like it had kind of existed before we even wrote it. A lot of the nineties music, when house music was really, you know, in big swings towards the turn of the millennium. House music back then had so many limitations on how they could write it. Producing wasn’t like this super easy thing that it is nowadays. The limitation back then made them have to be so creative with like doing as much as they could with one sample and like really create digging through like the 70s and 80s to find like that perfect song to take a little bit from and I think that we were trying to kind of creatively get in that space rather than getting bogged down with all the you know limitless potential that you have with writing music on a computer these days.
We’re trying to really simplify things and just write music with that really cool feeling of making you feel a certain way. And we wanted people to immerse themselves in that feeling you have when you’re out listening to music at a gig or a club and you’re so immersed in it that you’re kind of not really thinking about anything else.
So we’re really trying to tap into that. And I think the main thing that we thought when we started writing this album, I was listening to Daft Punk’s last record, Random Access Memories, and there’s that song with Pharrell called “Lose Yourself to Dance.” And I was like, that’s such a cool concept. So we just had that in our pocket as a little mantra while writing the album.
I like this idea of wanting to be able to immerse yourself in music again, because I feel like, especially now that we’re living in this world of TikTok, where you get instant gratification constantly and can put everything on five times speed and digest as much as possible without really digesting anything is really interesting.
The whole point was to make music that gets people long enough to make them feel like they can connect to this thing. It’s so instant gratification [with TikTok] that you’re not even really listening to a song anymore. You’re listening to five seconds, like a concept then they end up releasing it. It’s like this afterthought because then it matters. It’s that viral 10 second grab and then like the rest of like, whatever, people already profited. Some people do write music that surpasses that, like it becomes a TikTok song. But it’s also like people just love the artist so much and they love the song.
That even plays into what you guys were saying a minute ago. It’s this timeless feeling. Like that’s what the connector is in so much music. Music stands a test of time, it’s like these sentiments that can be felt across generations and across the decades. And with TikTok, there were so many songs that were written just for a vibe. But these artists that have been able to sustain themselves are making genuine timeless art.
Absolutely. And I think that’s it. There’s two ways, like some people are able to find viral success being authentic and then other people are creating viral moments. And then that’s sort of like this flash in a pan sort where it’s hot and then like, it’s not, you know, a trend anymore. So people move on to the next thing. So I guess some people like writing music for different purposes which is totally fine. They’re both viable.
I feel like there’s a difference between immersing yourself in music and dissociating on the internet, you know what I mean? It’s so interesting hearing how you guys, with this record, were wanting to give people a place to go and put some headphones on and disappear into the music and into those feelings because I feel like everybody is constantly overthinking.
I think partly the reason why we were going for a feeling over any other sort of concept was that it was our third album and we were trying to kind of reconnect with the feeling we had when we first started writing music. We weren’t thinking about any sort of preconceptions or motivations. We were just trying to really write it kind of pure with the concept.
The idea was to really just write music for music’s sake. Like when you listen to a record that you really love – for me it would be the John Hopkins album or Jamie XX’s last album or the new floating points album is insane. You can put it on and totally put everything on the wayside and immerse yourself in this thing that’s almost like escapism for, you know, 30 minutes to an hour.
Listen to the full interview with Cosmo’s Midnight on Name 3 Songs podcast available on your favorite podcast platforms.
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