When you first hit play on Cosmic Kid’s debut album, you’re hit with a wall of sound — in-your-face guitars, punchy drums, and vocals that both float through your eardrums and scream into your face. Frontman and bassist Wes Bacareza waxes poetic about the push-and-pull of adult life; monotony, nostalgia for better days, working jobs that are less than fulfilling.
This push-and-pull is arguably the heart of the record, aptly titled Maladjustment. The band — composed of Bacareza, Kurt Pumares, John Juanich, George Mañapao, and Edward Dy — barrel this point home with both sweeping, atmospheric soundscapes and headbanging chord progressions. The result? An eight-track album chock full of nostalgia and frustration, perfect for moshing or lying down on your bed and crying.
Ahead of their album launch show this March 7, we sat down with Wes Bacareza to talk more about the journey behind their first-ever full-length record. Read more below.
Coast2Coast: Can you describe what the journey was like creating this album?
Wes Bacareza: There were a lot of things that delayed the process of making this record like the pandemic, re-tracking sessions, and other issues outside our control. Although we started quite fast since Kurt’s [Pumares] imminent departure for an overseas job spurred us to briskly complete our end of the process, the aforementioned delay that followed was quite a thorn on our side.
What are your favorite tracks from the album and why?
My favorite as of the moment is “Changeling.” It’s fast and in-your-face, especially live. I’ve been enjoying hardcore music at this point in my life and that song carries that kind of spirit the most.
The album deals a lot with feeling out of place or “maladjusting” to adulthood – why was this such a prominent theme in your songwriting?
It was just what I was dealing at the time, being in this weird, transitive period where a lot of life changes were overwhelming.
Given that the themes between the songs are similar, how did you approach the arrangement or songwriting process so that each song still has its own identity despite being about similar themes?
We really were conscious of song individuality and I think we were basing their identities on the songs that were huge inspirations for stuff like tones and vibes; like a song would be our Nothing-esque song or another would be our Movements-esque song. Another thing is, if you look at the record as a something like a story, there are certain songs that were built for particular parts, like the beginning, and so on.
The first EP had a more prominent shoegaze influence while this album leans more heavily into emo, math rock, etc. How would you describe this transition?
What you’re referring to was our second record, which was the split EP we made with a band called Kiss Puppy. That was when we were trying to incorporate shoegaze-y elements into our previous sound, which at the time of our first EP, How This Makes Me Feel, could be described as pop-punk and emo. So by the time we were making Maladjustment, we were already sort of heading in this direction.
Given that this album was made over the past 5 years, do you still feel like it resonates with you now either personally or sonically?
The message of the record still echoes in our personal lives, so I’d say it would still resonate. That said, it’s been quite some time and we’ve been inspired by a lot of new sounds since that just make us eager, more than anything, to explore what we could do for the next record.
How would you describe your growth as artists from when you started writing the album to now?
The whole process was very educational in a lot of ways and it gave us a deeper understanding of how records are made, and to chase the best version of a song as much as we could.
Listen to Cosmic Kid’s debut album, Maladjustment, now.
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