Cosmo’s Midnight
Cosmo and Patrick Liney are a music artist duo from Sydney, Australia, represented by Sony Music Australia.
Image via The Backstage Access
Image via Cosmo’s Midnight Twitter
Cosmo and Patrick’s poppy, danceable tracks and quirky music videos have brought them global attention, as their albums bring listeners right into a positive state of mind. Cosmo’s Midnight is represented by Sony Music Australia, which curiously represents several sibling and twin acts, including The Veronicas.
The brothers collaborate closely throughout their music-making process with both distinct and shared roles. Pat has been contributing vocals towards recent tracks, including all the vocals for their 2020 quarantine creation Yesteryear. In what’s probably their biggest pop culture byline yet, at the end of 2020, Cosmo’s Midnight collaborated with mega-famous K-pop group, BTS, to produce and co-write the song “Fly To My Room” (even ABC Australia covered the story).
On how their sound has changed over time, Pat tells NME: “The thing is—as we’ve been performing live—it’s been evolving from a producer thing to a songwriter-y thing. Before we were writing beats and getting features for every song, now it’s gotten to a point where we’re crafting the whole song.”
Cosmo and Patrick’s Spotify About page simply reads: “twins from sydney who make music, hope you like x.” In spring 2017, we got a bit more detail by interviewing the brothers when they were in Brooklyn for their show at Rough Trade. The following interview is edited and condensed for brevity.
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Cosmo: It’s a real ask, “What’s it like to be a twin?” and I say “I don’t know.”
Daphne: Yeah, people ask, “Do you like it?”
Patrick: It’s like, I don’t know what it’s like to not be a twin, do you know what it’s like to be a non-twin? I say, “What’s it like not to be a twin?” and they’re like “Uh…”
Cosmo: And I’m not even trying to be smart or be a smart-ass, just tell me, because I don’t know.
Alice: What do you think about twins who work together, such as Doug Starn and Mike Starn, who work with photography, architecture, and sculpture?
Cosmo: Oh that’s cool. And they’re both twin sculptors?
Daphne: Yeah, they work together.
Cosmo: I find that really interesting, because whilst me and Pat do music together, I feel like getting into a specific practical art form...it seems so niche for two twins to both want to sculpt.
[Alice & Daphne laugh]
Alice: And you don’t feel that you guys are niche?
Cosmo: Yeah, because music is so consumed, and music was a part of our lives before as musicians, versus for two to both want to go into sculpting. Maybe if they’re both doing art, but both doing sculpting—there’s the idea of, “Let’s combine and conquer.”
Cosmo: In almost every interview we do, there will be a twin question.
Patrick: Yeah, some really banal question.
Cosmo: It’s always very surface level, like, “What’s it like being a twin?” And I always have a prepared question: “Being a twin is good because, blah blah blah.” And I say the same thing every time.
Daphne: Do you mind sharing what you say every time?
Cosmo: Yeah, it’s fine, I just can’t go any deeper into such a simple question. I usually take that question as a creative one, like what’s it like musically being a twin, so I say it’s really good because we don’t have to really be polite, and we know we have a goal that we need to meet without having to talk about it as much.
Patrick: You don’t have to tiptoe around the other person; you can be really to the point.
Cosmo: There’s no worrying about offending someone that you’ve known your whole life. At the end of the day, it’s all about moving forward. I’m not going to be polite if Pat’s ideas suck, and he won’t be polite if my ideas suck.
Daphne: That’s the thing—unlike regular working partners, you don’t have a choice and your relationship will still be there, regardless of the work. So, the twins just have to, they just work together. It just works.
Patrick: It was a very natural progression [to work together]; nothing was a decision.
Cosmo: Yeah, nothing was a marketing decision, like, “If we go as twins, we’ll blow up.” It was just that one of us did it or both of us do it. And I feel like if only one of us did it, it wouldn’t have worked, because both of our input is required to get the sound we make.
Cosmo's Midnight “Yesteryear” 2020 single album art via The Backstage Access
Cosmo: We do feel like it’s just a stronger look, matching. A lot of acts that aren’t twins match, or are coordinated, just because it’s stronger and gives the whole thing more of a theme, rather than feeling disparate. But we do try to push it in a way so that certain people who didn’t know we were twins would think, “Hm, maybe…”
Alice: And when we show you, for example, the other twins that we are working with in this book, or other twins who are in the public eye, do you identify with them or what is your reaction?
Daphne: For us, I still think of it as an external thing. I look at this list of twins we’ve made who work together and look really similar and I think, “That’s cool of them!” But we actually pretty much do the same thing.
Cosmo: It’s the same for us.
When I see a [twin] brother duo, that’s kind of as far as I look into it and I don’t think, “Oh, we’re doing the same thing,” because it’s so normalized to yourself that you still find it kind of strange when other people are doing it.
Daphne: I think there are a lot of these external comments or impressions about twins, whether the interest is coming from the kinky, fetishistic side of things, or if it’s just that the doubled image is easy to eat up.
Patrick: We were doing music together and were kind of well into it. We hadn’t really even thought about it until then, and realized we should kind of push the fact that we’re twins—put our faces on more stuff so people see that we’re actual twins.
Daphne: And what made you realize this—a friend said something?
Cosmo: It was fans, as well.
Patrick: And it was just looking back—why didn’t we just do this in the first place? We actually got a friend on board to style us for the video with the tracksuits, and he said he was only going to give us matching stuff and he told us, “Yeah, you guys have to do the twin thing.”
Cosmo: I wouldn’t say that being twins is, like, a lifestyle, it’s just the way we live. We don’t go out with a sign that says we’re twins, or do anything specifically twinny so that people know it.
Cosmo: People gravitate towards twins working in the same area of art or life because they are fascinated and weirded out by the idea of duality—“Two people who do exactly the same thing?” That seems rare to them, whilst for me and Pat it’s just the way it is. For some people, it’s just absolutely…
Daphne: It’s unnatural but very natural, in a way. There’s that edge.
Cosmo: Unnatural, exactly. It’s this strange duality that they can’t really understand.
Daphne: Because there’s that interest in the visionary artist—or creative or musician in general—that singular independent person who’s doing his or her own thing, different from everyone else—
Alice: That idea of the lone genius, lone artist.
Daphne: And then it’s just doubled because there are two people.
Cosmo: The idea of duos has been around forever, in mythology—it’s all over the place.
Patrick: There are so many inventions created by sibling duos.
Cosmo: Like the Wright Brothers, or all the film people including the Coen Brothers…I think that people just love the idea of two people—
Patrick: Doing the same thing. And the twin is the next best iteration.
Cosmo: Like if you think of two jazz musicians, and you think, “Wow, these two probably grew up playing music together.”
Alice: You can picture a narrative, right?
Cosmo: People immediately think of a story and a narrative and that helps drive the artists’ image so much more because it just triggers the imagination. For a single artist, you have to read about it, etcetera. Between two people there is an immediately interesting story.
Cosmo's Midnight “C.U.D.I. (Can U Dig It)” 2019 single album art via Album of the Year
Cosmo’s Midnight homepage thumbnail image via Laneway
More Cosmo’s Midnight
Cosmo’s Midnight on Spotify
Cosmo’s Midnight on Youtube
Cosmo’s Midnight website
Cosmo’s Midnight on new single, ‘Yesteryear’, Jackson Langford for NME, June 2020
Under the Covers: Cosmo’s Midnight, Darren Levin for Laneway, July 2018