Q&A: Electric duo Cosmo’s Midnight shares about their Current North American Tour and The Making of their Music
Australian duo Cosmo’s Midnight - consisting of twin brothers Cosmo and Patrick - have been embarking on their North American tour this year, bringing their eccentric sound and voltaic performances to life. With electric new tracks such as their single “BREAKTHROUGH” which was released this September, and their full album from 2020, Yesteryear, they have been a consistently outrageous and fun band with a dedicated following to prove it. They are mainstays on the electric indie scene, and for good reason.
Speaking on their current tour, the duo opens up about touring in America with their band, musical influences such as their mom, and the ethics of pillows while traveling. Naming their project after a random remix Cosmo made late one night, it’s obvious they are here, making music and playing shows, based on pure love for the art and doing something fun. Luckily for their audience, their music is fantastic as a result and everyone’s invited to be in the party.
Read below to learn more about Cosmo’s Midnight’s current tour, their future plans of writing more music in their studio garden, and what has been bringing them happiness as of late.
LUNA: What has been the best part of being on the road so far? What are you most excited for looking ahead at the rest of your guys' tour?
PATRICK: It's just so good to be back over here. It's been almost three years since we last came in September 2019. So it's good to see that. Not really all that much has changed, it feels very familiar. It's just really nice to get over here and play shows again and see faces we haven't seen in a really long time. But I think it has been a very different tour for us because usually we sort of fly to every destination but this time, we've been in an RV and driving everywhere, which I think has been really lovely because we've been getting like a real sense of space and places as we drive around, and actually see America rather than a “in the hotel”-type vibe.
COSMO: Also I’ve really liked how this is the first time we've toured America with our band. It's so fun touring with our band, because they're so funny. We all go out together and just hang out all day. As much as we thought we'd get tired of each other, it’s been great.
LUNA: Is there anything you guys cannot hit the road without?
PATRICK: Okay, I feel like this is something that we definitely had to take this year because we keep forgetting it - we have this real big UE Boom that basically has almost subs on that. We just take that on any tour we go on…and I got noise-canceling headphones recently. I don't think I've got to sleep in without them.
COSMO: I think this is something where the more I'm on the road the more I'm like, “Oh god I'm missing so many things.” I need so many more little things to make me comfortable. I never have a pillow. I wish I had a pillow but it's just one thing I never take on planes.
LUNA: Speaking more on your guys’ live shows, what would you say is the most fulfilling or exciting part of translating your music into an in-person performance?
PATRICK: It's just that whole thing where you’ve written it, and you've listened to it, but then you don't feel like you've really experienced it or know properly until you're playing it in front of people and are engaging with them, and seeing how they respond to it in a really intimate and real way. I guess with how removed a streaming option is, like Spotify, unless people are hitting you up and giving you commentary on it, or there are reviews or something, it's kind of hard to know what to think of it. Back in the day on SoundCloud, that was a very social thing, and people would be commenting and letting you know.
COSMO: Back when it was like the norm to walk into a store and get a CD, there was a process to getting music. Now it's very much, “Next, next, next. Oh, this one's pretty cool! Next.” It's very expedient in a way. I think the live shows are where you really get to experience things like reactions and responses to music, which is always a great feeling. There’s just the challenge of learning to play your own music. When we write music, it’s very different versus how I play it. When I'm writing music, I do it very slowly, I record everything quite meticulously, and then when I go to play it, I may not even be necessarily good enough yet to play that in one full go…it's just nice working with a band to realize your music in a different way, and it's challenging to get the sound accurate.
PATRICK: You're trying to figure out how to represent the record in a live space, which is a fun challenge. But it takes some days to…
COSMO: …to figure out a system that works.
PATRICK: I think the more we've been doing live, the more we've been kind of like bringing that into the writing process and sort of writing music that we're like, “This would feel fun to play live or like this.” You know, just like, this is really jammy.
COSMO: They inform each other, for sure. We write to perform and when we perform, we realize what we can then do when we go back to the studio.
LUNA: What are each of your favorite songs that you guys have written and your favorite to perform?
COSMO: Personally, I often feel like a lot of artists maybe have this similar thing where maybe the favorite song they've written is not like their best song per se. But for me, one of my favorite songs I've ever written is “Polarised” on our first album. It just feels like it really sat in a certain time and it documented a ton of my life. It doesn't have any particular sentiment to it other than how I was at the time. I just think it sounds pretty true to us at the time as well as something I can kind of carry for me, and this is a song that I can truly be proud of and sounds like our anthology.
PATRICK: This one we wrote for our last record called “A Million Times” is very different. It’s more like a psych rock sort of bit, a little Tame Impala-tempo kind of track. It was just a very hard one to perform, it’s very high, but it is a really fun track when you play it live three or four times. I think that something that I definitely learned after writing this record was with writing songs and then performing them, I need to write songs that you can sing. When I'm in the studio I can just keep cutting it until I'm happy with the vocals, but live I only got one chance to get the right impression. It can be very tough.
LUNA: I think one of the coolest things about you guys is that you're not just a talented duo of musicians, you guys are also twin brothers. How exactly did Cosmo's Midnight form? Did you guys ever think you'd be touring together and performing like this?
PATRICK: Oh, I honestly didn't know, we didn’t have any expectations with this project. It was something we were just interested in, playing around with basic writing. I was in high school and used the most simple form, just on the laptop clicking. I was just really obsessed with it. It just slowly kind of spiraled out into just making music every day, non-stop. Then as we went into university, we were just still making music every day and we just started putting stuff on SoundCloud. Some of the uploads started getting traction and eventually we just entered this competition to remix a Flume track, one of their first songs, “Sleepless”, and we won that competition. After we won that, this publication in Australia posted about us saying these local artists you need to hear like, artists Cosmo and Pat. We’re like, “The name is really not very good. We should think of something.” Our manager told us how Cosmo had done this remix of a track and called the song “Cosmo’s Midnight Mix” because he did it at midnight, so we just called it “Cosmo’s Midnight Mix,” and our manager was like “You should just call the project Cosmo’s Midnight,” and we're like, “Wow, that actually sounds kind of badass.” It kind of just stuck from there.
LUNA: What are some of your guys' biggest inspirations for your music and your sound? Why do you think they've had such an impact on your art?
COSMO: For me, there's a lot of artists that I look up to and listen to, but our mom was a composer as well, and she still does compose but she was a very traditional film composer back in the day. I think my mom is a very big inspiration for our music. We were living at home for, quite a long time, and she'd always come in and listen to us make music and have little things to say. She just had suggestions; they weren't like, “Oh, you got to do this”, it was just little ideas. They'd be completely wacky, but she's quite avant-garde and does a lot of atonal stuff. A lot of times she just has these great ideas like, “What if you did this for this progression?” That kind of stuff is so invaluable and it was just so nice as well, to have an involved parent in your creative process.
PATRICK: Both our parents were really avid listeners and they have just a vast collection of 60s and 70s music, my dad especially. He would hear us making something and be like, “This song reminds me of like, this record from the 60s or something” and then he'd send us a link to it.
LUNA: What is something that has been bringing you guys happiness lately?
PATRICK: When we tour together, like just me and Cos, we get pretty depressed, just in our own heads. I think touring with our friends has just really renewed my love of touring, to be honest.
COSMO: We basically now tour with our band everywhere.
PATRICK: It's been really fortunate to be able to bring the band over here.
We both lived in separate houses for the last few years, but we just moved into a new house together again and it feels good and familiar, but different. We've got a garden with a studio off in the back and that's something that I'm really looking forward to when I get back home. It's going to be late spring and I'mgonna walk into the backyard and chill in the garden and write in the studio. That's something that we've never had before this year.
COSMO: It's just a nice room in the back of the house/property. You get sun all day and when I get back we got almost two months off, I’m just gonna be in the studio.
LUNA: What can we look forward to from Cosmo's Midnight coming up in the future?
PATRICK: Part of the reason why we came over here during the three week break we had in the middle of what we're doing right now was that we're trying to finish our next record. We should have it wrapped real soon. Record number three doesn't have a name yet but it's getting pretty close. So look forward to that for sure!
Some more music dropping this year, and then a lot more dropping next year! This year is sort of wrapping up. It's been so nice to be back on the road, I just felt like it was such an unrealistic thing over the last two years to imagine if we went overseas or even just play a show again. So the fact that everything is opened up and it feels like momentum is back there, it's just so nice. We’re just keen to keep going back in the swing of things.
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