



Opening Cosmos with the ominous “Terrors” and closing with the hushed, hymnlike “Don’t Be Afraid,” Yellow Ostrich lace together electronic elements and organic instrumentation to build a mood that’s sometimes gloomy, sometimes euphoric, and often an inextricable mix of the two. Throughout the album, Schaaf’s fascination with Earth and beyond plays out both literally and as metaphor: there’s songs like “In the Dark” (a stark and dreamlike meditation on the journey of NASA’s Voyager 1 and 2 spacecrafts), as well as “Shades” (whose urgent guitar lines and frantic piano reflect the anxiety that Schaaf imagines many people felt upon seeing the first published photos of Earth and “realizing how small and insignificant we really are”). Although that fascination bears an undercurrent of lonely melancholy, Cosmos also achieves its own strange brand of bliss on songs like “How Do You Do It” (a joyfully woozy track whose bombastic chorus serves as a diatribe against self-delusion).

One of the album’s most exhilarating numbers, “Any Wonder” pairs a swirling soundscape and questioning lyrics that closely encapsulate the thematic heart of Cosmos (“I’m gonna try hard to tear it all apart/I wanna be stunned, don’t you?”). In writing “Any Wonder,” Schaaf again tapped into Carl Sagan’s careful illumination of the romantic side of science. “A lot of people have this idea that when you explain something, you take away the magic and mystery of it,” says Schaaf. “But sometimes the actual science of what happens is way more magical than any fiction we could invent on our own.”

For the Cosmos cover art, Yellow Ostrich selected a photograph by Bas Jan Ader, a Dutch artist who created a series of videos in which the force of gravity served as his main medium. An inspiration for “Things Are Fallin’” (the album’s epic penultimate track, which starts as a tenderly off-kilter ballad before shifting into a sprawling rock song and finally dissolving into eerie noise), Ader’s work also helped Yellow Ostrich tease out that elusive connection between the cosmic and the everyday. “We’re living in a time when we’re all split up into such small subcultures and everyone has their own personalized digital worlds, which can make it easy to lose touch with the basic principles that rule our lives," Schaaf says. "There’s so much that connects all of us and makes us all the same. No matter who you are, gravity’s always going to bring you down. I think there’s something really beautiful in that.”