Words by Ruby Kolik
The music video for Frost Children’s “Flatline” is a sea of 80s-style high contrast, saturated visuals. The fisheye lens is used for most of the video, and we see siblings Angel and Lulu Prost strutting around what we can only assume is New York City. The song, used in the video game FIFA in 2024, was released on their 2023 album “SPEED RUN,” and uses energetic, club-ready beats to match their footsteps. Angel’s voice cuts through the beat, as he holds a single note across a full bar, simulating the sound of the familiar medical sound. Their newest album, “SISTER”, released almost two years later, is a similar mix of electronic, abrasive sounds. Frost Children has maintained this emo, harsh electronic sound throughout these two albums, begging their audience to cut the lovey-dovey crap and dance with them, making songs with electro-pop icons like Kim Petras.
In an interview with Welcome Editorial, Lulu talked about the intention with the album:
This project is something that we’ve wanted to put out for a while. To us, it doesn’t feel like a 180. We’re just turning to this thing we were doing individually before we started this project, but now it’s more refined. It has just a sprinkle of intention. We’ve always wanted to have songs where we can just pick up a guitar and play it. I don’t think we’ve ever had that until now, which is sick.
When listening to the band, you wonder where they fit in the sphere of genre. If you try and pigeon-hole the duo into a specific genre, you’ll be wrong the next time they release something. They find themselves situated between punk bands like Skrillex and soft alternative artists like Alex G. “Stare At The Sun,” the third track on the album, includes a scream-sing element towards the end that calls back directly to the duo’s emo roots in their first band together: One. They described the music as a “spiritual” experience, leaving the lyrics behind and instead, using monotone screaming instead.
In their music videos, and their publicity, they hit on something particularly prominent with electro-pop artists: aesthetic. “Hearth Room” was less than publicized compared to their other releases. When listening, I wonder where these angelic vocals are coming from and how they contrast so differently from their visuals of other releases. In fact, the only video we received following this album was an 18-minute youtube home video “documentary,” showing the duo traveling and recording the album. They play with balloon animals, sit on the floor of their small home studio, carelessly strum guitars by campfires–which make a starkly more apparent appearance in this album–and put phasers on audio clips, toying with what sounds best.
In the video, the duo appears alone in the songwriting and producing process. However, this sound was brought to life partly from the help of Al Carlson, who mixed and mastered the album. Carlson, through a laptop screen window into his studio in Brooklyn, New York, said:
“Maybe it was a reaction to Speed Run, like ‘We’re also this.’ At the time they were saying they had a lot of inspirations and wanted to do different things—they weren’t just one thing. It felt like a snapshot for them, taking it easy in the Poconos, writing something more organic from the ground up instead of in the box.”
The duo, originally from St. Louis, Missouri, sang as children in their church. They have spoken about the prize they feel in vocal synchronization and their gratitude for growing up in the church. Angel in particular has addressed that, despite the fact that they didn’t particularly jump for joy when going to church, they valued having something to rebel against, perhaps urging them in the direction of the highly experimental genre of glitchcore and electropop. Because of this desire for rebellion, Frost desires to rebel even against what their listeners expect from them now.
There are songs on the album which showcase the higher level of saturation in instruments that they used prior, though. “Not My Fault” is arguably the most produced track on the list, using more synthesizers to create an unworldly experience. Despite even their highly reverbed and distorted elements in their music, the voices of the pair are never lost. Their lyrics and vocals are most prominently important to the duo,.
While the other albums may resemble artists that have come before the duo, adding elements of Green Day and Evanescence, “Hearth Room” slows us down from the noise and pulls us away from the wall of sound. Here, we are floating in a sea of alternative love. The opening thirty seconds of the album are a series of harmonizing vocals without any backing music. We are immediately set up to be relaxed.
When I asked about his work on “SISTER,” and how that process differed, Carlson said, “[It] was more dialed-in for them, especially for Lulu, who did all the mixing. It wasn’t ‘help us get this,’ it was ‘this is exactly what it should sound like.’ I worked on more than the vocals, but ultimately, they only used the vocal mixes. Those basically became the a cappella tracks.”
Frost Children consistently checks their alternative and emo boxes, always returning to their electronic sounds, but, in 2023, they took a detour into something more whimsical. The album shows us that, despite the hardened feelings we may have for softer music and softer feelings, there is room to love, and room to love loudly. We aren’t raging over a FIFA game, or in the middle of a club with a strobe light; we are sitting by the campfire with them, listening to the soft strumming of their guitar.
“Everything exists in a constellation of binary switches,” Angel said in the same Welcome interview, “Every song, every project, are these microcosms of nuggets of focused material, and presented altogether, those micronuggets of focus make a larger portrait. So the idea was these two vibes that are pretty different from each other, that you can switch in and out of. One compliments the other, and you get this double record that’s larger than the sum of its parts.”
Polyvox Magazine 
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