Cosign finds room to experiment on "Too Far For What"

Before Cosign properly existed, Martha Greer knew one thing: she wasn’t a folk artist. The slight issue was that she wasn’t giving anyone much reason to think otherwise.

Growing up in Belfast, Greer learnt piano before teaching herself guitar, spending her early years writing songs in a much more traditional sense. “I used to play a lot of more folk-y gigs, and I always was like, ‘God, I’m not a folk artist though,’” she laughs. “But I hadn’t done anything else that would’ve made you think that I’m not.”

Eventually, she hit a wall. Putting down the guitar and turning to a laptop and MIDI keyboard, Greer began pulling her songs apart and putting them back together again, finding a freedom in production that had been missing before. Out of that experimentation came Cosign.

Even now, she’s not entirely sure where it fits. “I’m still trying to figure out what world it lives in,” she muses. Melodic electronic music is about as close as she gets to a definition, with vocoders, arpeggiators and rich harmonies sitting alongside the more organic songwriting instincts she started with.

Her approach to writing the songs has changed with it. “I used to sit down and write a song in five minutes and be like, done,” she says. “If it’s not done in the day, I used to think: okay, it’s not happening.”

Nowadays, she thinks of writing more as “puzzling”. Songs can sit unfinished for weeks, and trying out a new synth or plug-in can send a project somewhere completely unexpected. “The production side of it and the writing side are equally as important and go hand in hand for me,” she explains.

New single ‘Too Far For What’ takes that willingness to prod at an idea and see where it goes even further. The first taste of forthcoming EP This Is What It Feels Like, it pairs Cosign’s restless electronics with a more self-destructive kind of compulsion. “It handles the friction of self-awareness versus self-destruction,” Greer explains. “It’s about knowing exactly how a compulsion ends but choosing to do it anyway.”

Co-produced with Chris W. Ryan, whose credits include fellow Irish acts NewDad, Just Mustard and Chalk, the single continues a creative partnership that began before Greer had really figured out what Cosign was going to be. Ryan has also become useful for encouraging Greer’s worst, or perhaps best, impulses. The more they’ve worked together, the noisier the project has become, increasingly wandering outside whatever boundaries Cosign may have had in the first place. “There are songs on this EP that definitely take it a step further than they had before, just because Chris was like, ‘Ah, let’s just do this,’” she says.

Her musical reference points are similarly all over the place. The Japanese House was an early obsession, and Greer was inspired by the way The 1975 could jump between completely different sounds from one track to the next. More recently, she’s been listening to Caroline Polachek and dipping further into the edges of hyperpop. Björk has also been thrown around as a comparison, although Greer is slightly less convinced. “I was like, ‘I don’t really agree, but I’m definitely going to say that,’” she laughs. “It’s a compliment.”

For a project that started largely “within [her] own head”, Cosign is beginning to stretch beyond it. Greer played The Alt Escape earlier this year and will head to Rotterdam’s Left of the Dial in October, whilst finding herself increasingly connected to the community of artists emerging across Ireland. That relationship is slightly more complicated coming from Belfast. Greer points to a lingering disconnect between the North and scenes happening only “20 minutes down the road”, as well as differences in the infrastructure available to artists there. She also feels people are finally paying closer attention. “There are so many good acts coming out of the North at the moment,” she says. “People are starting to listen to that a lot more.”

Finding where Cosign sits musically is another question entirely. Greer is still figuring that out herself and, for now, doesn't seem particularly bothered about finding a neat answer. Even the title of her forthcoming EP is more interested in how the project feels than what exactly it is. So, what exactly is the “this” in This Is What It Feels Like? “Everything,” she answers. “Just everything.”

The title originally came from a lyric, but quickly grew to encompass the record as a whole. “When it’s your solo project and you’re the artist, it can at points become all-consuming,” she says. “When I was writing it and starting to piece it all together, that was everything. It was a reflection on every emotion ever.” It makes sense that Greer tends to reach for films when trying to explain the world around it. Lost in Translation comes up, as does Lady Bird, both fitting her general love for films where “sort of nothing happens,” but you’re left with a strange feeling you just can’t quite shake afterwards.

Visually, Cosign seems to exist in much the same way. The single’s artwork, created by Louis Nelson, is an abstract blur of oranges and pinks. By the end of our conversation, we’ve landed somewhere even more specific for the upcoming project: Japan, the middle of the night, wandering around in the rain at 3am. For an artist still working out exactly what world Cosign lives in, that description feels like a pretty good place to start.