Cosmorat
Words by Courtney McChutney, Photographs by Helena Rose Coma
I met Cosmorat upstairs at Rossi Bar in Brighton during alt-escape ‘24, and although I am no stranger to the world of cosmic rats, I was blown away by their sound, musical talent, and stage presence. Shaking my ass to ‘Backseat Baby’ and singing along to my favourite song of theirs ‘Something in the Rain’. I think every band should take notes while watching Cosmorat live. After their set, I sat down at the bar with Taylor Pollock (vocals/guitar), Olly Liu (guitar/ vocals), and Lorenzo Burgio (drums) to delve into each other’s lives, then we relocated to the beach where I got into the nitty gritty.
Courtney: Who is Cosmorat, where is everybody from, and how did everybody meet?
Taylor: I am from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Olly is from Bath. Lorenzo is from Florence. Olly and I met in college in Boston and then we moved to London in 2020... which was terrible, because that was right before Covid.
Courtney: When did you guys start making music together?
Taylor: Olly and I kinda started making music together when we met. We’ve been in, like, four or five bands to be honest. But Cosmorat was our project, that was just me and Olly writing everything and doing everything ourselves. I think it’s an amalgamation of things that we’ve been wanting to do for years, but we were in other bands, so it’s been put on the back burner.
Courtney: Did you guys study Engineering?
Taylor: We did, we studied Engineering and Music Production, but as it was a music school, we did three years of performance classes as well.
Courtney: Tell us your story about engineering and who you’re working with at the moment.
Taylor: When we moved to London, I got a job at Strongroom for a while as an assistant. Through Strongroom I met Sam, who is my manager at Platoon, and I started working at Platoon. I was very fangirly of Marta Salogni, and I was in contact with her manager loads - I was like, “please let me work for Marta if I can”, and unfortunately Marta didn’t have any work for me at the time, but David Wrench had work. Marta’s manager connected me, and I got to work for David through that, and David is amazing and I think he’s the coolest guy and one of the best mixing engineers in the world. So, yeah, he’s really amazing. And then Olly moved to London and he started working at Sarm as a runner and then, from there, worked at a studio called Love Electric for a few months. He then moved to Eastcote Studios where he worked under a producer named Martin Terefe. He’s now recently moved on to working on freelance production stuff.
Courtney: How would you say your experience working as engineers has impacted Cosmorat as a project?
Taylor: I think it’s funny that we know what we’re doing technically, but when we do Cosmorat stuff, we try not to know what we’re doing technically, if that makes sense. Shawn Everett is one of our favourite producers and engineers. His whole vibe is that he learned all the technical stuff, like Picasso, to then go back and do things like you don’t know what you’re doing.
Courtney: Like you’re learning the rules to break them.
Taylor: Yes, that’s exactly it. So that’s kind of what we try to do. It’s weird because we also work out of our producer’s shed a lot. It’s a very small space, a lot of stuff is done bedroom style, which isn’t ideal for sonic stuff, but it makes it sound a certain way, like we’ve done it ourselves - which we have, you know, so it’s nice.
Courtney: Do you think you guys will continue doing that?
Taylor: We want to try to move into more studio oriented stuff, because we like to do that, it’s our jobs. For our next projects, we’re trying to do more in-the-room recordings with all of us, because Lorenzo joined after we finished the first EP, so he joined as a live drummer and now we’re all working together on recording the stuff, so it would be nice to actually get full takes of things and do them in a way that’s more band oriented and less bedroom pop oriented.
Courtney: Who are your current top three inspirations?
Taylor: Unfortunately, I will never not be obsessed with Elliot Smith. That’s like, on repeat all the time for me, which is really funny, because I feel like our music is not like Elliot Smith at all. I’ve always been a massive fangirl of Fiona Apple as well, especially Fetch The Bolt Cutters, that album is one of my babies. Let’s see, what else has been on rotation for me... probably St Vincent. Not necessarily the new album, but Actor is one of my favourite albums ever. I’d say that’s probably a good starting point as to what we’re inspired by.
Courtney: Is there anyone in the London grassroots scene that you’re loving right now?
Taylor: In terms of venues, obviously the George (Tavern), we love The George (Tavern). Fran is amazing, he’s just so good, on top of everything. Obviously Rats-Tails, always, and Fraulein, always. I like a lot of Leeds bands at the moment. Lots Of Hands. I love Lots Of Hands. There is a band called Kiosk from Leeds, they are fucking amazing. Flat Party, love Flat Party too. We played with them when we were opening for Courting. They were so good.
Courtney: You’ve done a lot of shows recently. Who have you played with that has really impressed you?
Taylor: So, Kiosk. They’re the ones we played with in Leeds. I don’t even know how to explain their music because it was everything I wanted out of music. It was, like, hyperpop, but a post punk band, if that makes sense? We played with Uto. They’re French, like, French House - I don’t know how to explain them either, but they’re really fucking cool. I think there are a lot of really really good people at the moment who are doing things that... I feel like for the past few years I’ve been in a musical drought, just, stuff that I haven’t been necessarily into, the past six months all this new stuff has come out and it’s like - holy fuck, it feels like the scene’s been invigorated, or UK music in general has been like... I don’t know, just really cool.
Courtney: If you could give any advice to anyone wishing to start a band, what would it be?
Taylor: To not try to be like other bands, because I do find sometimes, I think people really want to try to do the thing that everybody else is doing... which is cool, but it’s nice when you hear people that are trying to do their own thing. Like, I love that Rats-Tails is doing a 70s dream rock thing. Sometimes in London, you do get a lot of people doing the same sort of thing, which is great and does cause a scene, but also, I like it when I go to a show and I see people doing things that are just totally from the heart, something that’s just, not thought about not people are going to like it or not, you know? Just keep doing it, and also don’t be afraid to cold email people to play shows and find bands that you like to open for. Amazingly, people are actually quite open to talking to you and wanting to help. It’s lovely. Hopefully that’s good advice.
Courtney: I think that’s good advice. Are there any recurring themes or topics in your music?
Taylor: Definitely. I’m from quite a small town in the States, and I think a lot of my lyrics and a lot of the things I write about are centred around working class things and.. I don’t want to say “trauma”, because I think “trauma” isn’t the right word, but I think there are a lot of things that go on, especially in small towns and places that are maybe more depressed than other places, that from the outside people say terrible things like “oh, it’s a bunch of drug addicts, it’s a bunch of blah blah blah” and it’s like, there is such a deeper layer to things that happen. I know sometimes our music sounds really pop-y and stuff, but Be Like Me is about Televangelism and lots of people in America are very obsessed with their religion and very, like, into this thing, things should be a certain way. Backseat Baby is kind of about, like, “fuck the cops”, so yeah. It’s funny, because moving over here I’ve seen it paralleled quite a lot as well - like, we used to live opposite a council house when we moved over here and the fucking amount of police presence we just see all the time only in front of council houses and it’s like, this is definitely targeted. So yeah, I think we just try to at least touch on themes that aren’t touched on all the time. I mean, they’re definitely touched in a lot of music, but maybe under-represented, or, like personal experience.
Courtney: Your music videos are great. What’s the process behind them?
Taylor: We really like analogue. Do you know Jack Stauber? His music videos are insane. His data bending, and the analogue to digital, all that shit, is really cool. We don’t unfortunately have VHS stuff, but we did buy a TV off Facebook Marketplace that like, we have an old mini DV camera that we, like, film the TV, and then overlay it. We just do like a bunch of random stuff to try to emulate data-bending a bit, but it’s not as cool as Tim & Eric’s stuff either. So, we film it on the Mini DV, so it looks a certain way, then we put it on the computer to put it on to the TV, then film it again through the mini DV so it has a very analogue thing going on. So we do that, but the Something In The Rain video was just Photobooth. I think we just really like to experiment with different mediums and stuff. Olly just got this... I don’t know if it’s a DSLR, but it’s an old Canon camera that he’s just found all these cracks* for, so we’re trying to make it look like a super-8 camera and it kind of does, and then he also bought a CCTV lens for the camera so... I don’t know, we’re just buying all this old shit to see what it looks like.
Above - right to left: Lorenzo Burgio, Olly Liu, Taylor Pollock
Courtney: Is there a coherent vision that you’re going for? Why analogue as opposed to another medium?
Taylor: I think it’s the, sort of, nostalgic feel to it. I like that it’s the feeling of when you’re younger and you’re watching the big fat TVs, the deep ones. For me at least, it triggers a very specific emotion - it reminds me of being back home. And the Photobooth stuff - I don’t want to necessarily say it’s all based around nostalgia, but it is a bit, because we try to go on things that trigger very certain feelings. The Photobooth thing for me reminds me of the first time we ever had an Apple laptop in our house was when I was fourteen, and my sister went to college for the first time and they made her buy it with the bundle. I just remember sitting for hours on fucking Photobooth and it being like a thing. Our friends would come over and we’d all go on Photobooth. Why? I don’t fucking know, but Something In The Rain was meant to be something like “Oh, you’re turning on Photobooth with your friends”
Courtney: The No Sleep video was really cool. Very haunting.
Taylor: We literally went to Queen’s Wood in the middle of the night just because we thought there’d probably not be any posh people around at midnight. So we went to Queen’s Wood and we filmed all of it in the rain and it was hilarious, but it was fun.
Courtney: Where do you see Cosmorat in five years?
Taylor: I would have liked to have written an album by that point. And I’d like it to be coherent - I wouldn’t say a concept album, but something I’d feel really proud of. So, in five years time I hope that we have made something that we feel matters. Something I feel good about. I do feel good about everything we’ve done so far, but something I want to be able to look back on and be like, that was a very special piece of something I’ve put out there. I don’t know if it will take five years, but I don’t know how long it will take, so we’ll see.
Courtney: What is your advice to women in music?
Taylor: That’s a good question. I think it can be intimidating sometimes when you show up to a gig and you’re the only woman there. I don’t want this to come across in a way that sounds bad but, anybody calling you emotional, or too much of a diva or a drama queen in it is bullshit and you should never listen to them because most of the men I’ve met in the industry are way fucking worse. So I think that it’s okay to feel like you deserve to have emotions and deserve to be able to perform in a way that is maybe more emotional, or you deserve to be able to ask the fucking sound engineer for something different and not be afraid to act like the men that are there. Because I’ve been so nervous, especially going into gigs, but then Lorenzo, obviously because he’s a dude, he just doesn’t understand why sometimes - but watching him do it, I’m just like “I should just fucking be like that, why not”. So then I do act like that, and sometimes you do get backlash from people being like, you know, rolling their eyes or whatever, but it’s also like, you’re not gonna fucking get what you want unless you ask for it so you might as well, because they aren’t going to like you anyways. So I think just, ignore the noise, I guess? Ignore the noise.
Courtney: Anything else that you want to add?
Taylor: I think it’s important to be true to yourself and true to the music you make. A lot of noise can come up, especially when you’re starting something, other people start to like it, and then other people start to give their opinions on it and I think it’s really, really important to stick to what you’re feeling, to your gut instinct. In the end, it’s your project and your intuition, and I think it’s good to be true to that and, again, five years time look back and think “I’ve made something that I think is worthwhile... for myself at least, even if nobody else likes it”. (laughs)