Cosmic Sans is a psych-rock band unable to shake its folksy and alt-country Montana roots. Over the past several years, the band has played anywhere from gold mine ghost towns to showcase music festivals, gaining a healthy local following in the process. Their latest single, “Yuri,” is an ode to the first human in space, Yuri Gagarin. To find out more, I dropped the band a line and chatted with guitarist Will Stoskopf and singer Jake Howell…

Who’s in the band, and how did it come together?

Will:  There’s Jake: our chief songwriter who sings and plays guitar, Seamus: our secondary songwriter, lead guitarist, and producer of all our releases (he sings a bit too), Lane: our bassist, Cole: our drummer, and Will (me): who also plays guitar, sings harmonies, and plays a little synth/keys too. 

Jake and I have known each other since our freshman year of college and we played together in this band called Wet Mop that did really bad reggae/jam band covers of Arctic Monkeys and Dead Weather songs. After that inevitably (and thankfully) ended, Jake and our original bassist, Kyler, got the idea to start a psych rock band. They asked me to join as the lead guitarist with Jake playing rhythm, and Kyler found this guy Jack to play drums. Right before our first rehearsal, Kyler (who was in the music school here at the University of Montana) invited a fellow music student named Chris over to play keyboards with us, who in turn invited his friend Seamus who played guitar. There’s a funny anecdote where I misremembered our rehearsal time and I ended up showing up 30 minutes late to practice, and when I got there I saw Chris and Seamus, whom I had never met. Seamus and Chris were going at it in a furious jam session with Kyler, Jake and Jack trying to keep up, and I immediately felt incredibly out of place.

Unbeknownst to us, although Chris was originally going to play keys,he had turned down an invitation to play drums at the Berklee College of Music, and he definitely looked the part. I had already resigned myself to the fact that I was out of my league and was expecting to be kicked out of the band before the first practice, but the rest of the guys asked me to stick around and play rhythm guitar to Seamus’s lead. Jack saw the writing on the wall and decided to give the drums position to Christian, so the lineup ended up being Jake on vocals, Seamus on lead guitar, me on rhythm guitar, Chris on drums, and Kyler on bass. That next summer, Chris left to play at a conservatory in Groningen, Netherlands and Kyler quit to focus on playing jazz bass. We then enlisted the help of Cole, an established player in our local DIY music scene, and Lane, who lived in the same dorm as Jake and I our freshman year and played trombone in a jazz ensemble at the university with Seamus. 3 years later we’re still together!

Great band name! When I first saw it, I misread it as “Comic Sans,” but adding that “s” in the middle gives it a nice twist. Where did the name come from, and do you ever have to correct people when they get it wrong?

Will: There’s another funny story to that. When Jake and Kyler first got the idea to form a band and before I had even joined, Kyler got us a gig at a house show in town called Hockey House (coincidentally where Cole was living at the time). We didn’t have a name decided at this point, and we threw a few ideas around before using the placeholder name of Cosmic Sans, the title of a Cory Wong song. After that first show, we kept getting gigs so the name stuck. As of now, none of us really care for the name, and we’ve been passively looking for an opportunity to rebrand. One of the reasons I personally want to change it is because we’re always confused for “Cosmic Sands” or “Comic Sans.” Even this last week when we got the final master back for “Yuri” the file was marked “Comic Sans Master.” Unfortunately for us but fortunately for our listeners, everyone seems to love the name, so it’s sticking for now! 

I also love the name of your album: Psychedelicatessen. You’re obviously into having fun with words. Does that factor into your lyrics as well?

Jake: I love portmanteaus and ‘clever’ wordplay opportunities. I think my biggest thing I strive for in my lyrics is to remove glottal stops and create strong flows within sentences, and a lot of that desire stems from words that sound similar placed next to each other, hence Psychedelicatessen. I also think I sat on that particular album name for years before we even had enough songs to place on it. 

Who did the cover art for that one? 

Will: I’m embarrassed to admit this, but the cover art was made with an AI prompt. Jake had the idea of having the cover be an oil painting of a grotesquely huge greasy deli sandwich, and Seamus enlisted his girlfriend Lillian to make one for us. She didn’t have a lot of experience with oil painting, so none of us, including her, could get a product any of us were really satisfied with. We had a hard deadline approaching quickly and we were desperate, so we threw the original idea as a prompt into an AI image engine and got what became Psychedelicatessen. For this next project we’re collaborating with a few really great local artists, so we’re doing our part to make up for that injustice to the arts community.

Psychedelicatessen is your second album. How does it reflect a change from your self-titled first album? How has the band been evolving? 

Jake: The first album was named after the band because it is what it is. There was no grand plan, hardly any thought process behind why we wanted this body of work assembled. The second album reflects a maturation of that process but personally I think it was about 50% of the way there. This upcoming piece of work is representative of the artistic leaps we are attempting to make, and the previous two albums are the imperfect steps we took to reach it. 

Will: We just got the test pressing to our Psychedelicatessen vinyl back and Cole and I were listening to it last night, so this observation is fresh in my memory. Almost every song on that album, which is a double LP, has a long extended Seamus solo, but only a single song off of our upcoming release has a Seamus feature. I think this is a testament to how our songwriting has improved; when we were first starting out, we didn’t have enough songs to fill up a typical set length, so we had to resort to Seamus indulging in (though tasteful and virtuosic) gratuitously long solos to fill time. It’s taken a while to break this habit, but we’ve shifted roles to have Jake play more rhythm guitar which frees me up to join Seamus in harmonized riffage. Most of the songs off the upcoming record, including Yuri, showcase this, which is a development I’m really excited about. 

You toured the Pacific Northwest in 2022. How has playing live contributed or translated to the band’s approach to making music in the studio?

Will: We utilize live shows to workshop and refine songs that we plan on recording in the future. For instance, we debuted Yuri at a show on February 2nd last year, and playing it live has helped give it a natural progression to a finished product. Our live sets this year have consisted of virtually all unreleased material, and the atmosphere of live performance gives energy to an experimentation that I feel is necessary to get the sound we’re looking for. 

What experiences stand out from that tour?

Will: Oh there are so many. The whole thing was kind of a nightmare from the start, which I think is how most first tours go. Our first stop was at Laker’s Inn Bar in Coeur D’Alene, Idaho on a Tuesday, and we were told there would be a house PA system for us to use. When we showed up the bar staff had no idea what we were talking about. While sitting around waiting for the bar staff to get ahold of their manager, a severely intoxicated man who introduced himself only as “Renegade” told us through slurred speech that he had a PA speaker at home which was just up the road. We retrieved the speaker from his house, and for bottomless pitchers and $200, we played every song we knew to 3 people. That night after our set we drove to our campsite and the next morning woke up to a sunrise over Lake Couer D’Alene, wondering if going on a trip to play songs outside of our homebase was a terribly ill-informed idea. That tour it probably was, but subsequent ones definitely have felt a lot smoother!

Your forthcoming single, “Yuri,” is an ode to Yuri Gagarin, the first human in space. How did you go about translating Gagarin’s journey into a song with broader appeal? To put it another way, how, in your estimation, does Gagarin’s experience translate to the more mundane concerns of everyday life? 

Jake: The album will be called Missile with a Man in It, which was famously how Chuck Yeager described his inaugural flight at subsonic speeds. Yuri Gagarin, as opposed to his American counterparts, was the ultimate first. The craft was well-made, but with glaring problems, and the mission was more daunting than anything that had ever been attempted by mankind. To say Yuri is the litmus for the album wouldn’t be incorrect. There are songs from the perspective of Kamikaze pilots, air traffic control on aircraft carrier escorts, doomed cosmonauts, and from Voyager 1 that all (hopefully) coalesce into this statement about what mankind can force itself to do, against all notions of safety or well-being, only for the greater good, whatever these men believed that to be. 

And why Gagarin—as opposed to, say, Neil Armstrong? (Sorry about the chants of USA! USA! in the background.)

Jake: Yuri is a great choice because he is far more unknown than Armstrong, at least in the Western Hemisphere. Armstrong and several other American astronauts campaigned and were responsible for the first art installation placed on the moon, which was a plaque commemorating men who died on the way. Yuri’s name, as well as another man, Vladimir Komarov, who has two songs about his experiences on the upcoming album, are placed near the top. There is something magical, to me at least, about celebrating the lives of these men through music, when their names are the only ones printed on another celestial body other than our own. (And the USA chants don’t bother me, there’s no sound in the vacuum of space.) 

What’s on the horizon? 

Will: A lot is happening! After Yuri is released, we’re playing a local show with Hotline TNT, touring all the way from New York City. The day after that, we head to Boise to play in Treefort Music Fest, then we head off to a nearly month-long tour of the west coast with our friends in SunDog (who are from my hometown of Anchorage, Alaska). When we come back we’re going to finish recording Missile with a Man in It, then take an extended hiatus after Cole and I move out west to go back to our respective hometowns of Portland and Anchorage. We plan to release singles from Missile with a Man in It while we’re separated, then reconvene to tour the album once it’s sent out to the world. Stay tuned!