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From Pitchfork.com

Indie-pop has always privileged shy people who manage their world by making it feel as small as possible. Enter Greta Kline, a 19-year-old who records under the name Frankie Cosmos. Her new album, Zentropy, is 10 songs and less than 20 minutes long, opening with a complaint about art school and closing with the eulogy of a pet dog. In between are explorations of love, aging, and the other intricacies of private life, all rendered with the simplicity of a stick-figure drawing.

As its title suggests, Zentropy is a playful but disciplined album. Most of it consists of pretty, tuneful music in a tradition that connects Best Coast to Beat Happening to pared-down takes on 1960s girl-group pop, anchored by a three-piece drum set and an electric guitar—the utility kit of a band that occasionally wants to get loud without ever having to leave the living room. Its longest song is two and a half minutes long, and its best, “Birthday Song”, is just over a minute. “Just because I am a certain age, doesn’t mean that I am any older/ Than I was yesterday,” it starts, Kline’s voice as sweet as a child’s but firm as a board.

Kline is not afraid of cute, self-evident statements like this, nor is she afraid of using them as a bait-and-switch for more complicated ones. “I think how repulsive to you it must be when I refuse to do the things you want me to,” she sings a few seconds later. Like every line on Zentropy, it sounds innocuous when you hear it, but conveys a feeling so rich it could fill a song five times as long. “Repulsive” alone has an almost atomic presence: Pry into it and something unexpectedly big might explode.

Toward the end of the album, Kline confesses, “I do what I/ Have to do/ This is when I say my ‘I love you.’” For a 19-year-old, she has an unusually good grip on the obligations and nuances of long-term relationships, and an ability to relate them in ways that feel clever but direct. “I’m bitter like olives,” she jokes on “Leonie”, but then pivots: “That’s why you like them and I don’t.” Her simplicity is her mask: It makes her seem like she doesn't have anything to say, which is why it’s so surprising when she does.

In the same way rappers exaggerate confidence to give listeners the thrill of feeling strong, Kline—as is custom in our time of ironized over-sharing—exaggerates her sadness to make space for real vulnerability. “I’m the kind of girl buses splash with rain,” she sings. Not just a girl, but a kind of girl: A cliché you’ve seen in movies and heard about in songs. And yet, as soon as she sings it, her sadness feels light and abstract—something playacted. There’s an argument here: The first step to feeling better is to let yourself feel bad; the second is to realize that whatever you’re feeling is probably somewhere on TV right now.

For all its little-girl-lost poses, Zentropy is a tight, confident album. Kline—the daughter of actors Phoebe Cates and Kevin Kline—seems emblematic of the way culture is being re-zineified by shows like "Girls" or publications like Rookie: Examples of young female voices who can articulate intimacy in a way that feels savvy and clear. But she also belongs in a larger conversation about older things: the New York poet Frank O’Hara (of whom she is a fan), the sweeter moments of filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, or the sister group the Roches—clever, funny writers who navigated the margins of urban life with heartache and whimsy. What Zentropy reminds me of most is Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach’s Frances Ha, a movie that did less to capture the sociological particulars of Brooklyn in the 2010s than the archetypal triumphs and disappointments of young life in a big city.

In the past few years, Kline has released over 40 albums and EPs on Bandcamp. Had she wanted to, she could have included 50 songs here, maybe 60. But why muddle the point? She knows what she wants to say and she is saying it. If there are weak moments on the album, it’s when she steps back into a bigger sonic picture: the girl-group chorus on “Dancing in the Public Eye”, the distancing echo of “I Do Too”. Like any music whose strength lies in its intimacy, the fewer reminders Zentropy gives us of the world outside, the better.

Is this music simple? Yes. Solipsistic? That too. But in Kline’s withdrawal, there’s also a kind of humility: Never will she speak for anyone’s experience but her own. “He was just a dog/ Now his body’s gone,” she sings on "Sad", the album's last song. “So what is left, but me and my poem?” Nothing, maybe, but that doesn’t matter: The poem is plenty. _____________________________________________________ All records are shipped in record-specific boxes with bubble wrap.