Hello Cosmos – ‘Come Out Tonight’ album review: A shot of genre-fused adrenaline
The streets of Manchester are awash with rehearsal spaces that are peeling at the walls, desperately crying out for a band to come inside and add to its rich tapestry of DIY history. On their fourth studio album, Come Out Tonight, Hello Cosmos are proving that they are not yet above it.
The Skinny: Because The Manchester band are taking the gritty earnestness that all of these humble spaces foster and are injecting it into an album packed with the sort of energy that got us all into music in the first place. Because the drums feel dry, the guitar lines feel distorted, and the vocals are urgent enough to take you to that enclosed space of a live show.
The entire album almost feels like an endlessly spinning wheel, bouncing through the caustic landscape of modern Britain. Opening tracks ‘Joy Is The Way’ and ‘Grind Into The Shine’ start that roll, with the bassline acting as somewhat of a powerful engine to do so. It’s a soundscape the band clearly feel comfortable in, for it is the instrument of songwriter and singer Ben Robinson. There’s a cadence to his vocal style that feels inherently tuned into the rhythm section of the songs and thus allows them to take centre stage and provide the power.
This rhythm provides a consistency whereby this proverbial wheel can change its pace. Take ‘Turn Off The News’ for example. It’s drenched in static noise and a sort of caustic atmosphere, but always feels as though it’s moving. Clawing at the surface of the hill it climbs, before cresting and inciting all-out chaos for the downhill sections.
Robinson’s vocals are crucial to this entire album, though. Because in parts it is deliberately chaotic, but that intention can only really be noticed by Robinson’s vocals, which bounce around the soundscape, making sure we hold on for dear life. But all the while, it’s captivating and helps tell the lyrical stories of the record with a crucial sense of urgency.
‘Fuk Zuk’ brings an underlying funk to the rhythm, which makes it a standout track on the record. ‘Hot Seat’ and ‘Black Gloss’ follow suit as they chug through the brutalist world this record has created with a sense of efficiency that the A-side of the record helped build up. The arrangement of these tracks allows a song like ‘Awake & Bake’ to change tactics and bring a more contained style to the overall record.
The Verdict: Rawness, brutalism and chaos merge together to create an album that takes you back to the early foundations of your music journey. Sure, it blends genres enough to contradict the more rudimentary tastes you might have enjoyed in those early gig-going days, but it’s packed with a basic and innate sense of emotive urgency.
Defining track: ‘Fuk Zuk’
Release Date: December 5th, 2025 | Producer: Jamie Lockhart | Label: Cosmic Glue
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