The first post-punk wave at the end of the seventies flushed The Monochrome Set into the light - and the band hasn't disappeared since. To this day, it is considered a reliable representative of fine pop music. Their admirers include icons like Morrissey, Edwyn Collins, Franz Ferdinand, The Divine Comedy and Graham Coxon. They all credit The Monochrome Set as a major influence on their own music. With their timeless black-and-white sound, the band seems to inhabit a parallel universe: they deliver pleasure and despair, joy and fear, comfort and melancholy, packed into melodic pop songs with whimsical lyrics. "Cosmonaut" is already the thirteenth album in their long career. It can best be understood as a trip that begins with a hallucinating cashier and then floats through various dreams involving cannibalism, discontented squirrels, strange gods, dying sweethearts, sexual abysses, Alzheimer's as well as a backwards evolution to finally end in an operating theatre in a sea of healing tentacles. In short: a surreal camping holiday.