Hello Cosmos cruise California and mooch Manhattan on SKIN

After cruising California and mooching Manhattan, boundary-breaking, multi-media, seven—miles-from-Manchester collective, Hello Cosmos complete their latest EP with the impatient, jagged, shoegaze broadcast of Skin. The fifth and final track to be released from the Keep Digging EP – OUT NOW - it's the first collection of music released by the band since their 2023 remix album, Hard Dirt, and creates a bold vision for the band, their Cosmic Glue label and their future live experience.

Acutely observational, with no small sense of wonder and disdain, pulling in equal measure, for the world around us, the words, motivations and energy of Hello Cosmos’s central figure, Ben Robinson (founder of the UK’s Kendal Calling festival) beat from Skin’s uncompromising core. Pulling at free lyrical and musical threads that have wound together into a coherent, occasionally challenging whole, drawing comparisons to Sleaford Mods, Idles and LCD Soundsystem, Robinson and Hello Cosmos’s anger, joy and wonder at creative happenstance pulses along in time to Keep Digging’s all-too-brief, mind-widening journey.

Gathering owls and spare bottles of absinthe into the story of their previous single release, Use The Tools, this time Hello Cosmos find new heights in the sky above California, and within the chemical compounds of legalised highs on the ground, all in the company of producer, Hereldeduke.

“A trip to the States and a jam session in New York saw ‘Skin’ emerge,” recalls Robinson. “The morning after jamming out the music, I flew to San Francisco and wrote the lyrics on the plane. On a high from the off-the-cuff studio session in NYC, Hereldeduke and I booked a studio just a day later in Los Angeles. We drove there down the coast. Californian gummy bears influenced the guitars and vocal take on ‘Skin’, all recorded at The Blue Room Studios in LA.”

Pressing ‘go’ on the EP run-in with Turn Off The News, a forbidding, visceral critique of the curdled atmosphere that followed lockdown parties, scandals, fraud and corruption, the fresh unambiguity that comes as part of the Hello Cosmos package was laid out in the open in mid-2024. An open family, porous to diverse ideas, Hello Cosmos works outwards from the steady, four-piece membership of Robinson and his drummer brother, Simon Robinson plus Angela Chan of Placebo/Lanterns On The Lake and Adrian Ingham, also of Deathretro.

Unreleased and only now unleashed as part of the complete Keep Digging package, one of two, previously unheard songs is the loose, muggy and purposely disconcerting three-minute title track.

Speaking about the making-of, Robinson recalls: “’Keep Digging’ is a Halloween track as we happened to be in the studio at Blueprint in Manchester on that date. Adrian had the riff with the odd guitar sound that’s become a feature of the tune, so we worked it out from that. I went spooky on the vocal and found some new ground in terms of style. Ang's string work is eerie too. We leaned into the ghoulish vibe of the day.”

As much a story of internationalism as localism, as Hello Cosmos settle into their own Cosmic Glue studio/label family, firmly centred on a community of creatives and artists in the north of England, the EP’s story is incomplete without fifth and final track, Butterfly Wing (Turn It On). Casting signals between ‘home’ in Manchester to those far-flung studios in the USA, this time Robinson headed further south, to Florida, to set his burning ideas free.

“We were in Florida for a holiday and I booked a couple of days in a studio,” he says. “From a few ideas, ‘Butterfly Wing’ took shape. The lyrics came from endless traffic jams between theme parks, staring at LED billboards. Florida is just a commercial project. So many cars and so many warning signs of how bloated capitalism and the US has become. We hired some Mustangs, with soft tops, and rode to the studio in them, at sunset down the 'I' motorway, it was surreal, like being in that classic arcade game ‘Daytona’.”

Written and recorded over a two-year period, the Keep Digging EP and yet-to-be-announced, upcoming releases from Hello Cosmos, were created at Greenmount Studio in Leeds as well as in Manchester, New York, Florida, Los Angeles and Stockport.