Frost Children are carving out their own weird universe

It’s mid-afternoon and Frost Children – siblings Angel and Lulu Prost – are speeding down the highway from Los Angeles to San Francisco, where they’re due to play yet another show. All they can see outside are trees and concrete, trees and concrete, nothing else for miles. “This kind of looks like where we grew up,” Lulu says, eyes on the road, flame orange hair billowing everywhere. They’re referring to St. Louis, Missouri, where they spent their childhood years. “Yeah, it’s a commercial outlet suburb,” Angel adds, adjusting the position of the iPhone we’re speaking through, a thin pink scarf shimmering around her neck. “People drive there to shop at, like, a Hugo Boss outlet store.”

If you haven’t yet heard of Frost Children, they’re best described as very “right now” and “very online.” Publications love to call them “hyperpop” but, really, they’re more like a mishmash of genres spanning synth-pop, glitchcore, screamo and bright, frenzied electro-punk. If this were the mid-2000s, they’d have probably been major on MySpace. Instead, they spend their time shitposting on Instagram, releasing insane DIY videos on YouTube and conversing with dedicated fans on Discord. In that sense, more than just releasing music, they’ve carved an online Frost Children universe. “Our fans are pretty stylish – cool makeup, coloured hair vibes,” Angel says. “Some fans yesterday brought their own Halo swords, which is a prop that we use on stage. That was really sick. We were signing those afterwards.”

Frost Children became a band in 2019. Before then, the pair were in different locations, “doing our own things”. Lulu was in Nashville studying music and producing for pop singers and songwriters around campus. Angel was in the Bronx, New York, studying neuroscience. She dropped out to pursue the band life instead. “Brain surgery during the day, music at night. They’re similar when you think about it,” Angel says half-joking, tucking her blonde hair behind her ear. “I guess I had the realisation that, like… it’s risky to put yourself out there and do music. But it’s also risky to go to medical school. You might fail. So you may as well do the thing that you want to fail at.” They moved in together shortly afterwards, making tracks from their NYC apartment, quickly becoming well known in the Downtown Manhattan and Brooklyn creative scenes.

Frost Children’s early music leant towards maximalism and chaos. Scroll back two years on their YouTube channel, for example, and you’ll come across songs like “Sonic” and “Bl!nk” which sound like candy-coloured fever dreams pushed through arcade machines. Now, on third album Speed Run, their sound has become tighter, glossier and more refined, while still retaining their wild, idiosyncratic flavour. On album-opener “COUP”, their voices float, ice-clear and angelic over colourful, synth-cushioned beats: “Like, oh my god, what the fuck, who are you?” Later, on “LET IT BE (feat. EXUM)”, they talk-rap in a drawling vocal fry over hardcore techno. “It’s a club record,” Lulu says. “You could play the whole record front to back at a club if you wanted to.” Angel agrees: “The more music we make, the more we think about how it’s going to be performed.”

At this point our internet connection cuts out, everyone’s faces remaining frozen on the screen. None of us are able to rejoin the chat, so we agree to part ways for now. Two days later, I catch them again, this time from a hotel room in Winnemucca, Nevada. They show me the grey car parks and 24-hour sports bars surrounded by cinematic, snow-capped mountains outside of their window. It’s quite a sight to behold. The San Francisco show, the one they played following our last conversation, was wild: “a crowd of 90 people, everyone vibing”. During one song, they slowly substituted every member of the band with someone from the audience, “until it was an entirely new band”. Angel laughs, rainbow-coloured bracelets clattering on her wrist. “It felt like a cool little fan engagement moment,” she says. 

Most stories shared by Frost Children tend to circle back to their fans. They tell me how, at SXSW back in mid-March, there were audience members who came to all nine of their shows, fully decked out in cutesy merch. They have plans for making future shows wilder and more theatrical, so that fans can feel like they’re walking into “Disneyland or something”. “We already have people that travel from city to city just to see us,” Angel says. “That’s crazy. If I did that, I’d want to be floored and welcomed into this world. Like, you’ve travelled, you’ve made it, and here’s the thing that you came for”. Frost Children are becoming more than just musicians. They’re forging a tight-knit community for music nerds, fashion kids and the hyper-online to let loose in both physical and virtual spaces together. It’s a gang you can’t help but want to be part of. 

To that end, Angel offers to give me a “bracelet tour”. Each one of her bracelets was given to her by fans after shows. They’re odd – typical of the band’s heavily ironic humour. One bracelet simply reads “hehehehe” (“It’s based on our song ‘LAUGHINGLAUGHING’,” she says). Another one reads “Life be simpler when you nonchalant, as soon as you start chalanting, shit goes left,” alongside a cartoon of Stewie Griffin from Family Guy drinking a can of Monster Energy. Another one reads “Pony”. On her index finger is an enormous plastic green ring, princess style, like what you’d find in a toy shop. “It’s so vibrant – more vibrant than a real gem,” she says, sitting back proudly. “And that’s the whole set.”

Frost Children leave you feeling invigorated. They’re exciting – like all the more playful, creative, weirder corners of the internet smushed together into music that pulls you into its expansive sugary macrocosm. They’ve made a truly energetic club record, too. The kind of post-lockdown music that’ll make you want to log off and find somewhere with neon strobe lights and huge speakers and sweaty bodies to dance with. With Speed Run, it seems, they’ve created a mega-online soundtrack to their ultimate fantasy party – and everyone’s invited. 

Credits

Photography Avery Norman