Stream: CMON, ‘Zoo’

Kevin Bronson on February 4th, 2020

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The new single from L.A.-based duo CMON feels like going on a road trip in your head, scenery flashing by in a polychromatic blur, insistently propulsive but at the same time lulling. “Zoo,” out today, is the follow-up to “Coo” (no, all their song titles do not rhyme) melds the duo’s affection for ’80s FM radio fare and dance music, adding brushstrokes of atmospherics to make it their own brand of psychedelic pop. The new song comes with the news that CMON’s debut album “Confusing Mix Of Nations” (the source of the acronym they adopted for a name) will arrive April 3 via Mexican Summer.

To review: CMON combines the talents of Josh da Costa and Jamen Whitelock, who formed the collaboration from the ashes of Regal Degal and eventually matriculated from New York to Los Angeles. They sought to escape a DIY scene that felt like “we had our little world and it was like we were these cavemen huddling around this fire that only we really understood,” da Costa says. Heeding the call of the dancefloor, they set their internal metronomes to four-on-the-floor, intent on moving bodies.

As for their band name, it came from a record store where their Regal Degal bandmate Josiah Wolfson once worked. “There was a section of world music called “Confusing Mix of Nations,” da Costa says. “Taken literally it sums us up perfectly. I was born in NYC and partially raised in Brussels by parents who are from the Carribean, while most of my family lives in Amsterdam, and Jamen is half-Taiwanese from Miami.”

As for “Zoo,” the song was made on a rainy night in L.A., da Costa says. “The zoo in question is right across the street from where my grandmother lives in the Caribbean,” he explains. “It’s a strange, shady place with a sad energy on an otherwise idyllic island. Both bleak and mystical. The combination of sunshine and weird vibes is a source of great inspiration — I get plenty of both in L.A., which is why I live here.”

||| Stream: “Zoo”