I first discovered Frankie Cosmos at around 13, when a then-19-year-old Greta Kline’s solo project burst into the semi-mainstream, thanks to her 2014 debut EP Zentropy. I remember my dad driving me to Fairview Middle School with “Art School” echoing through the tinny car speakers, Kline’s clear voice ringing out with “High school makes you crazy / High school made me cry.” Cue me, afraid and wide-eyed, to my father: “Is high school really that bad?”
I remember being 15 and discovering that it can, in fact, be that bad—sneaking off at lunch to sit in the library, staring out the window like the protagonist of an independent film, imagining the camera lens closing in to the sound of Kline’s then–22-year-old voice on Next Thing: “I stand alone / Lucky and unknown / Do I belong? Do I belong? Do I belong?” I remember being 17 and hitting my rock bottom, my head in my hands as a 24-year-old Kline’s “Cafeteria” rattled around inside it: “I wonder what makes me so wrong / What makes me so wrong?” I remember being 18, nursing myself through the death rattles of a long-dying relationship with Kline’s mid-twenties wisdom on Close It Quietly: “I want it so bad that I hate it so much / Are you for or against? / Well maybe I’m both / Maybe I’m both.” And I remember being 21, now painfully disabused of the fantasy that college would fix me and newly aware that life continues being life regardless of your environment, trudging to class with Kline’s latest record, Inner World Peace, in my headphones: “Time and space / A translucent weight / Invisible ’til they fade away / Over and over, once or forever.”
We order our drinks (iced, because it’s a heatwave in New York City; they arrive with cute little straws that look like miniature barber poles) and spend the first three minutes of the interview petting an extremely friendly dog visiting us from the next table over, then the next three marveling at the unfathomable length of the mini-microphone cord I hand her. She smiles fondly as she tells me about the shirt she’s wearing, the design coming from a comic strip her friend drew about a local library in California. Over the next hour, the conversation meanders wildly: from the New York School of Poets (as a hardcore O’Hara-head myself, I am legally obligated to talk Lunch Poems with the artist literally named after Frank O’Hara) to New York Times Connections (“I can go on a total tangent about puzzles,” Kline gushes); the Hulu comedy series Pen15 (which Kline insists I, and everyone else, watch) to the British game show Only Connect (which I insist she, and everyone else, watch).
It’s strange, meeting someone who has already narrated your life back to you for more than a decade—and stranger still for it to feel as easy and as natural as that hour in La Bomboniera did. But that’s the thing about Frankie Cosmos, and about Greta Kline: She’s always had this way of making the deeply personal feel universal and the universal feel deeply personal—of giving voice to the ineffable, the existentially terrifying, and couching it all in an intimacy so breezy you almost forget, even if it’s just for a moment, to feel afraid.
Why, then, would someone pursue a career so rooted in expression, when they’re so painfully aware of how futile it truly is—how we’re all fated to never truly understand what another person means? For Kline, it is precisely that dread that spurs her to create. “Well, that’s why I keep making music. You can never stop, because you have to keep trying to express it, or else… That’s it. That’s what you’ve said about existence.”
As much as she loves the written word—she takes her stage name from Frank O’Hara, after all—there’s a reason she’s always been drawn to music as her chosen medium. “Music, it’s ephemeral. The whole thing is that you can never describe the feeling it’s making. That’s the whole point. Otherwise, the description of a song would feel exactly the same as the song itself—but it doesn’t, because it can’t. That’s why I feel like art is a mirror, I think; you’re giving someone else language to see themselves in when regular language itself isn’t enough.”
I feel a little guilty, then, because interviewing her is an exercise in exactly that: attempting to describe her music with words alone. I say as much, and she just grins. “I mean, of course it’s hard. You write the song, and now you’re supposed to talk about it—but everything you wanted to say is already in the song. It can say it better than I could right now.”
In that sense, music itself feels a little like its own form of “different talking,” to borrow the name of Kline’s latest album. The phrase originated from something her godson said that her band found so cute they started using it as a little inside-joke slang. But over time, it took on a deeper meaning: a way of naming that intangible feeling when something lands differently than it otherwise would, because of some tone, texture, or unspoken undertone you can’t quite name. When guitarist Alex Bailey suggested Different Talking as the album’s title, it immediately felt right—and given what Kline sees as the purpose of music, it’s easy to see why.
Because of how impossible it is to predict or govern anyone’s reaction to your work, Kline jokes that releasing music (or interviews) into the world feels like exposure therapy. “It’s kind of an exercise in giving up control,” she says. “I have no idea what someone might think—and you can never control what anybody’s going to think of you. So you might as well just be okay with it. Because, at the end of the day, literally all we have is being okay with who we are. That is all we have.” It’s odd, perhaps, to hear this from an artist whose early work was defined largely by not being okay with who she was: as she sang on the devastating “Cafeteria” in 2018: “I wasn’t built for this world / … / I wonder what makes me so wrong / What makes me so wrong?” Yet here she is in 2025, with a new album that’s something of a functional opposite: Different Talking builds its own world, looks back at the past with kindness, and makes peace with itself.
“I think something happens as you get older,” she says, “where you start to have friends die young. And you’re like, ‘Oh my God, we’re too young for this,’ but it doesn’t matter. It happens anyway. I thought I had 60 more years before I’d have friends die. I didn’t. So I think there was a mortality thing that set in where I just realized: ‘Well, I cannot spend my life like this.’” Then she laughs. “It’s a little bit YOLO, honestly. Like, YOLO, plus… take care of yourself, you know?”
If you spend your life dreading the future or mourning the past, you leave no time for, well, living. But if you refuse yourself the right to fear or to grieve, you’re cutting yourself off from your own internal world. Kline spent a long time oscillating between those extremes, but has reached something of a compromise: “I think just being older now, I’m more thoughtful about what I’m going through at any given moment. And I think that’s a good thing. I don’t think thinking about your emotions is bad,” she says, cracking a grin. “Part of being happy and finding good love in your life is also about having awareness of what doesn’t work, so you have to go through some bad times—and you have to remember those things too. Sometimes I do worry people will be like, ‘Is this girl really writing the same songs for nine years about a breakup from so long ago?’ But it’s not really about holding onto anger. You just get new hindsight and clarity you didn’t have before. Writing angry songs helps me release that old tension, move past it. It gets it out of the system.”
And getting it out of your system is crucial: you can spend all your time hosting “a funeral for [your] wasted years,” as Kline sings on “Not Long,” but also, as “Tomorrow” reminds you, you still have a show to play, you still have people to see and things to do—you still have a life to live, and at some point, you’ve just got to live it. Because, the longer you spend berating yourself for your “wasted years,” the more wasted years pile up. Kline learned this the hard way.
“When I was 23, I said to myself, ‘By the time I’m 30, I’m going to figure it out.’ And now I’m 31 and I still haven’t—and it’s really hard now! It gets harder to build habits when you’re older. But eventually, you just have to say, ‘It doesn’t matter that I didn’t do it then; I just have to fucking do it now.’ Dude, right now, I’m literally learning how to drive. I’m doing all these things now that I should have done ten years ago, but who cares? You just do them when you can, and that’s what matters.”
GRETA KLINE MIGHT BE making up for lost time now, but it’s been a long journey to get there—a long journey, and a public one. For better or for worse, she has spent most of her life in the public eye. At first, this was simply because she happened to be the daughter of actors Kevin Kline and Phoebe Cates, but before she even finished high school, she became known far less for the last name Kline than for her O’Hara-inspired stage name, Frankie Cosmos. And while we all love to throw around the term “nepo baby” these days, Kline’s musician origin story is less Willow Smith and more Will Toledo. Yes, she had a Pitchfork feature the day following her 2014 studio debut, but appearances can be deceiving: By then, she had already released over 45 collections of songs on Bandcamp (first under the name Ingrid Superstar, then—at the suggestion of her then-boyfriend, Aaron Maine of Porches—Frankie Cosmos), and spent six years churning out album after album to little attention. But much like Toledo (who famously spent years unknown on Bandcamp before becoming one of the most defining indie voices of the decade), while it took upwards of a hundred songs for Kline to breach the mainstream, the moment she finally did, it was full steam ahead.
Between the soft, warm intimacy of Zentropy and the pithily heartrending introspection of Next Thing, Frankie Cosmos quickly became a touchstone voice for Kline’s generation, her lyrics hailed for her unique ability to capture the mundane devastation of growing up in the 2000s with a maturity that far belied her years. Even now, more than decade later, this perception of Frankie Cosmos persists: While the band is now a four-piece, publications still refer to the outfit as if it were still synonymous with Kline herself—a misconception Different Talking, more than any other record, aims to shatter.
And, of course, time has passed as well. Aging is strange and hard for everyone, but there’s something particularly surreal about growing up when your public-facing persona seems frozen in time, despite your best efforts. “I think it’s funny to be going through this thing of ‘Oh, I’m old now,’” Kline says, lips quirked. “Obviously, I’m still very young; I’m only 31. But I’m older than what people think of when they think of Frankie Cosmos. They think [I’m] 19.”
This isn’t to say Frankie Cosmos has disappeared into the media ether since Kline’s huge breakout a decade ago, but she’s the first to admit that the level of buzz she got at 19 wasn’t sustainable—for anyone, much less someone still figuring out who they wanted to be. This was soon exacerbated by the attention that followed her split from Maine, another brutal rite of passage she was forced to navigate in full view of fans and critics alike.
Even after she and Maine had broken up, journalists (who adored the narrative of indie’s adorable young power couple) and fans (who were borderline parasocially invested in their relationship) continued poring through her lyrics for clues about what went wrong. Moving on from your first love is hard enough without strangers telling you after shows just how much your now-ended relationship gave them hope. Understandably, the whole experience left her wary of the trappings of “fame” altogether: “I was just, like, ‘I’m not doing a public relationship again,’” Kline laughs, self-deprecatingly.
That scrutiny also fed into a more insidious pattern: the refusal to treat her songs as constructed works of art rather than diary entries arbitrarily set to music. “I think it’s a way that people discount artistry in women, or fem-presenting people,” she says, echoing Mitski and other female artists who have made similar critiques. “Like, ‘There’s no way you wrote a story,’” she says, mocking the disbelief. Even now, reviews often ignore everything but the lyrics: “I notice that with my music, people don’t comment a lot on the sonic elements. Sometimes we’ll get a review and the band will say ‘Damn, they didn’t mention the stuff we did at all.’” Kline is, of course, quick to add that she does consider herself a poet, and that the words are a huge part of what she does. “It’s a very lyric-heavy band. The lyrics come first, the music is rhythmically following it,” she elaborates. “When I write a song, I’m putting something under a microscope, looking at the cell that makes something up—and inside it, there’s a whole universe.” But it’s the song’s responsibility to create that universe, that sonic world, and no small number of conscious choices go into the process of actualizing it. The lyrics never exist in a vacuum, with the instrumentation always serving as an extension of the content, and to focus on one without the other makes little sense.
By 2019, the stress of constant touring had taken its toll. As grateful as she was, the relentlessness had left her running on empty. “I was starting to get really burnt out,” she says. “I hadn’t had any time to myself in eight or ten years, hadn’t had a single moment when I didn’t know exactly when my next tour was going to be. My whole life was touring. And apparently I was visibly depressed,” she laughs, shaking her head. “I’m finding out now! At the time I thought, ‘Oh yeah, I was loving touring!’ But I’ve done all these interviews lately where someone’s like, ‘Hey, I saw you play in 2019, and you were really depressed. Are you good?’ So I looked back at my diary, and I realized: ‘Oh, I guess I was. Oh, I was hating it.’” There was guilt, too: “You shouldn’t feel like you’re clocking in at Starbucks when you’re going to play a rock show to hundreds of people. That shouldn’t ever feel like, ‘Ugh, God, I have to do this.’” But, for a time, it did.
Then came the pandemic—and along with it, something of a silver lining. “I was wanting to take this break,” she recalls, “and COVID kind of gave it to me. It was weird, but good. It helped me realize that I did actually want to do this.” After a few months, though, she started to feel restless: “It was great to have a pause, but then it was like ‘Oh, this pause is kind of too long.’ And I had to think about what my life actually was, who I was without touring. Like: ‘Who am I without this career that I had? And what will I do, if when [this pandemic ends], that career might not look the same?’”
Now, in 2025, Kline has found that balance—and that is, in part, thanks to the fact that her career doesn’t necessarily look the same. “There’s a freedom in not being so buzzy,” she admits. “It’s not that we’re not successful now—we are!—but I feel like, when I was 19, it was just this crazy thing. And it was funny because, at the time, I was just doing DIY touring! I don’t know what happened, really. But for some reason, we were so buzzy with our second album [Next Thing], and it was just insane—just so much.” Since then, a song off that album (“Fool,” which featured on Netflix’s Hilda and went semi-viral on TikTok to boot) even went gold, which she’s still reeling at: “I never thought I’d have a song go gold. That’s the craziest thing for me to say. Especially because it’s a song from when I was a fucking teenager! I was 19 when I wrote that!”
While there’s no rhyme or reason to the whims of the industry, Kline does have her guesses for why the “buzziness” has faded: “People are very interested in a 19-year-old who has dropped out of college and knows what they want to do and is playing 100 shows a year. I think the less interesting headline, particularly in our society, is, like, ‘Woman in Her 30s Doesn’t Have Children, Doesn’t Have a Normal Life,” she laughs. “‘Woman Tours Away Her Womb.’ Or, like, ‘Woman Tours For the Entirety of Her Fertile Years.’ It’s less sellable. Nobody likes that. If you’re a man, it’s a different story, but for women… Not a chance.”
Yes, Greta Kline has aged out of the music industry’s arbitrary and hyper-narrow criteria for “young up-and-coming female singer-songwriter darling”—and she couldn’t be happier about it. “That’s exactly what has given me the freedom to say, ‘I get to make whatever the fuck I want.’ And going gold with something from when I was 19 also gives me the financial freedom to know that I can pay for the tour, I can stay in hotels.”
“Now the only question is: how can I access that fun?” she exclaims. “The whole point of being in a band is just wanting to make and play music with the people you love. And I’m just really trying to tap into that now—to reconnect with the things that made it fun to me as a young person.”
FRANKIE COSMOS’ SIXTH ALBUM, Different Talking, is not about reinventing the wheel. It’s about making the wheel you always wanted to make but never quite could—about returning to the vision you’ve spent your career approximating and, for the first time, bringing it fully to life. It’s Frankie Cosmos, with a full band and without fear; Frankie Cosmos, with both the maturity that comes only with age and the whimsy Kline should’ve felt at 19 but was forced, by circumstance, to grow out of too soon. (As she declares midway through our conversation: “It’s the summer of whimsy. Let’s make it happen. Hashtag it. #WhimsyGirlSummer.”)
This whimsy, of course, is tempered by a new kind of self-awareness—a clarity about who she is now and what kind of world she wants to build around her. Different Talking sits in a strange temporal limbo where past, present, and future blur together like watercolors: she’s looking back on her younger self with kindness even as she grieves her, inhabits the present with confidence even amidst regrets and dread, and gestures towards a future where all can coexist. Fittingly, she sees it as both her most mature work and, simultaneously, her most childlike. “The whole album feels very: ‘Here I am in my 30s! Yeah, I’m older, but I’m not done, though!’” she grins. “But at the same time, there’s a childish, naive feeling to the album for me, too. And a huge part of [Different Talking], I think, is talking to me when I was younger—because now I can look back at that version of myself and be like, ‘She was so special.’”
In some ways, the record is a testament to the idea that real maturity is not necessarily about abandoning who you once were, but learning to see your past self with love, not shame—that, sometimes, real maturity is letting yourself feel like a kid again, too. (Fitting, then, that the album’s name comes from Kline’s three-year-old godson).
Though the album often meditates on aging—at one point she sings, with mock horror, “I stand in front of the fire and think about my / One! Grey! Hair!”—it seems as if Kline has never felt younger or freer while making a record than she did on Different Talking. And that’s not a coincidence; it’s a concerted effort, one that bleeds through in every aspect of her craft right now, from songwriting to production to performance. “I’ve always been very still onstage. I feel like people who have seen us play in the last ten years think of me as this very chilled out bedroom pop, like, ‘She’s standing completely still. She has no stage presence. What is she doing?’” she says, wry. “So now—as a joke, almost—we’re acting crazy on stage sometimes. Rolling around on the floor, whatever. It’s kind of what I used to do in basements way back in the day. We call it Passion: like, ‘Let’s do Passion tonight.’ And it’s been really fun, because it’s like… let’s act like 17-year-olds in a band tonight. There’s this childlike joy in it.”
Part of that joy, she says, came from the process itself. For the first time since her Bandcamp days, she self-recorded the album with her band—turning the house she shared with bandmates Bailey (guitar), Katie Von Schleicher (bass, synth, engineering), and Hugo Stanley (drums) into a full-scale studio. “It was just so different from typical recording,” she says. “I mean, the studios we’ve worked in have all been super cozy and lovely, but it’s not the same as going to your room to sleep and waking up with the gear literally ten feet away. We’d watch movies at night where the drums were set up—we’d have to move the amps just to watch a movie. And it just created this mindset where we were figuring out the album, of course, but also laughing and being silly with it, playing and messing around.”
It helps, too, that Frankie Cosmos is now more collaborative than ever. From Stanley’s propulsive drums on “Your Take On” to Von Schleicher’s buoyant bass on “Bitch Heart” to Bailey’s electric shredding on “Joyride,” Different Talking is easily the most full-band-driven Frankie Cosmos record to date—and that was very much intentional. “We’re really upping the amount of instrumentation. We’re touring with so many amps,” Kline laughs. “It’s crazy. We have an amp for the keyboards. We have two amps for one guitar, a dry and a wet amp.” It’s all, she says, thanks to her band: “My bandmates right now are people who are really sonic people, really interested in building a sonic world, and they brought that sensibility to the record. I think Katie and Alex and Hugo and me—we all really just took so much time and care with this one. We took more time on this album than any other; 40 days compared to ten. We were just messing around, trying different effects and delays and sounds, just building more sonic worlds than I ever had time to before.”
This collaboration—and the self-production—allowed Kline to finally realize the sound she’d been chasing since her teens. “Very early on, there was a way that I always wanted the band to sound, but that’s something you can’t really verbalize,” she explains. “But with this album… I really feel like we got it. It’s kind of scary to say that because, obviously, I don’t want to be done. I want to make more albums. But, here, we kind of achieved the thing that I always wanted to achieve—it sounds like how I’ve always wanted it to sound, but never had the language to communicate to a recording engineer, or the recording skills to do myself.”
She sent Different Talking to her former bandmates Luke Pyenson and Lauren Martin, and to her delight, they felt the exact same way, without her having to say a word: “Luke said—this quote really rings through my head—Luke said, ‘I feel like a fucking idiot for ever paying to record in the studio,’” Kline says, laughing. “To hear Luke and Lauren, who were in the band for so long, acknowledge this thing I was feeling… I’m just so proud of it, this record.” Though it still sounds distinctly like Frankie Cosmos—a long tracklist made up of short, pithy songs; lyrics that drive the rhythm rather than vice versa; an absence of the typical verse-chorus-bridge structure—something intangible about it feels different. There’s a “different talking,” so to speak. Perhaps it’s an understated confidence here that her earlier records lacked—the introspection and self-awareness remain, but the self-consciousness has faded.
I propose as much to Kline, and she pauses, suddenly mid-epiphany: “Woah, wait. I’m learning something about my record, literally as you say this.” She pauses, collecting her thoughts. “What I’m realizing is, in the past, I’ve always felt like an alien, like an outsider.” I quote back to her one of the lines that’s haunted me for years, from “Cafeteria”: “I wasn’t built for this world / … / What makes me so wrong?” She nods, gaining steam: “Yes, exactly. But now… I’m so content with my place in the world. I feel very comfortable just being myself every day, and knowing that no matter what, it’s still just… every day. And it’s so cool to think that with this album, I’m not mirroring a world that feels outside me anymore. Instead, I built a world around me—built my world.”
After everything she’s been through—the meteoric rise, the quiet burnout, the rebuilding—what strikes me most, sitting here across from her, is how much Greta Kline has come to embody the thing her songs have been teaching me all along. The thing I couldn’t quite believe back when I was 15 in the library, or 17 in the cafeteria, or 21 on the way to class: that you can belong to yourself, even when you feel like you belong nowhere else, and that can be enough. “I think that’s it. All those other songs were screaming out at a universe I didn’t feel like I was part of,” she says, decisive now in her assessment. She breaks into a smile. “And now, for the first time, I’m saying: ‘Come on in. This is my universe now.’”
Casey Epstein-Gross is an Assistant Music Editor at Paste. Her work can be read in Observer, Jezebel, and elsewhere. She is based in New York and can typically be found subjecting innocent bystanders to rambling, long-winded monologues about television and film, music, politics, and any number of opinions on bizarrely irrelevant topics. Follow her on X (@epsteingross) or email her at [email protected].
