Interstellar
The title *Interstellar* accurately reflects the atmosphere here—and considering Frankie Rose\'s previous work, it’s a surprising direction. She\'s a former drummer for Vivian Girls, Crystal Stilts, and Dum Dum Girls, and her earlier solo release (backed by her band The Outs) was noisy, reverb-rich, and influenced by \'60s girl bands. On *Interstellar*, she works with producer Le Chev to create a glossy and spacious synth-pop album that echoes \'80s new wave. The first crystalline notes of the opening title track signal the reinvention of her sound, which is anchored by sparkling, highly polished production. Her vocals are dreamy and clear, light enough to float pleasantly into layers of keyboards and synths. The songs are minimalist, precise, and ringing with clarity. “Know Me,” “Daylight Sky,” and “Night Swim” are bouncy and mesmerizing, with shimmering guitar figures and crisp drumming. The gorgeous ballad “Pair of Wings” has a similarly spare structure but unfolds with a slow, subdued power. It repeats the same sweet melody for three verses, adding texture until the song dissolves into space, creating one of the more memorable passages on an album full of meditative and ethereal moments.
We were all knocked out by the Frankie Rose and the Outs album from 2010, the effortlessness of its gorgeous girl-pop mantras, the intimate immensity of its Spector-esque walls of reverb, the beauty of a song sung sweetly over the most graceful two-chord vamps. But are you ready for the new Frankie Rose? – her transformation into a wholly other kind of pop, the reverie and revelation of "Interstellar," an album that floats free of its maker’s history – time spent with Vivian Girls, Dum Dum Girls, Crystal Stilts, and creator of one of the most breathlessly compelling girl-pop albums of the past few years – and offers the listener something strangely other, as alien as it is familiar, as compelling as it is enchanting. Talking with Frankie about the record, it’s clear she was itching for a new start. The first big indication – production by Le Chev, remixer supreme (for Lemonade, Narcisse, Passion Pit, and Frankie’s own “Candy”), an ensemble member of Fischerspooner, etc. “We recorded the record in a private studio dubbed The Thermometer Factory in Park Slope. I wanted this record to be totally different and in so doing I knew I had to work with someone who would lend fresh ideas and know how to make sounds that I wouldn't know how to make. I wanted to make a particular record and I knew Le Chev would be the one who could help me do it.” So, out with the reverb of the Frankie Rose and the Outs, and in with something altogether more glam, glittering, shivering. On "Interstellar" Frankie takes the lessons learned with her debut album – like reverb as the holy route to pop-grandeur, scaling a wall of teenage tears – fully digests, and transfers those skills into the brave new world mapped out by ten new songs. In its place is the confident swagger of a singer and auteur fully aware of how to build the simplest of pop moves into aching, full-blown melodramas, how to grab hold of an emotion and ride its darker waves. “I always have a big picture in mind,” Frankie reflects. “I knew I wanted a HUGE sounding record. Big highs, big lows, and clean. There is no fuzz on this record. I knew I wanted to make a streamlined, spacious record with big choruses that sometimes referenced 80s pop.” But that referencing never swamps the melodies: this record isn’t a retro trip. If anything, it liberates sounds familiar from that decade and gives them new context, breathes life into clay golems of sound that too often become basic, pre-set triggers. On "Interstellar," Frankie Rose goes epic, goes widescreen. “Had We Had It” spins the sweetest sugar from chords that ascend into the firmament, a heavenly, palatial blur. “Gospel / Grace” rumbles with passion, a New Order-esque one-finger guitar figure leading the listener into the choral depths mapped by the chorus. “Apples For The Sun” is breathtaking, with Frankie singing out across a lone piano, before a glorious web of voice and organ pirouettes into the air, an arbor of pleasure connecting the verse with its instrumental shadow, a coda that slowly slips from your view, before making the briefest, most tantalizing of returns. A lot of "Interstellar" seems to be about disappearing into, or finding and reveling in, this kind of imaginary zone, something Rose confirms: “The whole record is about dreaming of some ‘other’ place.” And as you drift into the heartbreaking “The Fall,” which floats out to sea on a lunar-aquatic cello riff that’s pure Arthur Russell, you’re ready to conquer those other places, too, to let Frankie Rose guide you out of the album’s spell and land you back in the sensual world, slightly altered, adrift and in awe. How does it feel to feel? With Interstellar, your emotions come out so alive, your only escape is to dive right back in.
While kicking around the jangle-pop scene, Frankie Rose was a member of Vivian Girls, Crystal Stilts, and Dum Dum Girls. On her second solo album, she transports us further and takes us higher than she ever could have as the drummer of an indie pop revivalist band.
It took Frankie Rose several years to develop from a temporary member of snotty retro-rock groups like Vivian Girls, Dum Dum Girls, and Crystal Stilts to the full-fledged singer-songwriter of her new solo album, Interstellar. But in that time, her reference points jumped forward a couple of decades. Interstellar exchan…
No longer just a musician who's played with Crystal Stilts and various Girls (Vivian, Dum Dum), but having picked up a few…
Gone are ‘the Outs’ and the playfully fuzzy textures of Frankie Rose’s debut album; little is left to signify her involvement with Vivian Girls, Dum Dum Girls, or Crystal Stilts. And this appears to be precisely the point. Every track on Interstellar aims for some unspoken celestial high.
Ex-Dum Dum Girls, Crystal Stilts, and Vivian Girls member Frankie Rose certainly has an impressive pedigree.
There is a passage of music on ‘Pair Of Wings’, one of the standout tracks on this, Frankie’s second solo album (and first without her Outs), that is so perfectly beautiful it could tend even th
The garage rock veteran's second solo album swaps the scuzzy sound of her former bands for shimmering new wave, writes <strong>Hermione Hoby</strong>
Brooklyn indiepop mainstay Frankie Rose takes a stylistic sidestep into dreamy, shoegazer territory on her irresistible new album, writes <strong>Michael Hann</strong>