‘Sister’ might be Frost Children’s third full-length album, but for members and siblings Lulu and Angel Prost, it feels more like their first. “I really think it’s our strongest, most-focused [record], like a debut in a way,” Angel reasons from their New York studio, just over a week before the album’s release. “It feels like this is the thing, and I’m excited to keep doing shit like this.”
The duo aren’t ones to remain in one place with their music, bringing new ideas and fresh sounds into each album they make. “The thing” for ‘Sister’ finds them tapping into the early 2010s and the golden age of EDM – a genre that, certainly nowadays, often gets looked down upon in “serious” music circles. Frost Children, though, are keen advocates for it.
“With any genre, there’s a lot of different levels of quality throughout the years, but the good-tiered EDM that I’ve really stuck with throughout my whole life feels like the rawest form of pop music,” Lulu says. “It’s so egoless in a way that’s beautiful – the lyrics are more just like, ‘This is the last night of our lives, we might not get tomorrow’. That feels so like it doesn’t even matter what is happening in your life or whatever you’re going through; this is the only thing you have to think about right now – dancing and singing beautiful songs.”
Angel nods in agreement. “The naivety of the lyrics in classic EDM is just so pure and special to me,” she adds. “I honestly just feel like EDM is the folk music of America for this generation. It feels like a common thread has pulled all of pop music together for people like us. It was a conscious choice to go in that direction on this album. We definitely were like, ‘Oh, we could do this and do this, but this is who we are.’ This is what we know how to make best, and I think it shows.”
You grew up listening to EDM and learning how to produce by making it or dubstep. What do you remember about discovering EDM in the first place?
Angel: “The first real intro I had was my older brother showing me Skrillex on his laptop. I was like, ‘Holy shit’. I remember being upset at first and being like, ‘No, that’s not music.’ Because I was into rock music as a kid, like a lot of kids whose parents like music are. I really liked Van Halen, Breaking Benjamin, Three Days Grace and these new grunge bands back then. I was like, ‘This sucks.’ I don’t know why, as a 13-year-old, I had a contrarian opinion to it. Then I was like, ‘Wait, actually, this is the best thing I’ve ever heard. That was probably the first moment. Then from there, it just became my whole life.”
What impact would you say having that experience and being opened up to that world had on you as musicians but also as teenagers growing up?
Angel: “I definitely kept doing it as I grew up, and as I got older and met more people and understood what parties were, I understood where EDM sat and it eventually penetrated the pop music landscape as a whole in the early 2010s. It impacted me but it also impacted the world at that moment and then impacted me again through that. I just wanted to DJ really bad when I was in high school, but I was unpopular and didn’t really have that many friends so there wasn’t really any opportunity for me to do so. But it was always an escapist dream that EDM gave me, which is why I feel like it’s this folk music in the same way that rock and roll in the ‘70s was this liberating feeling for kids who felt like they were nothing or no one. That’s the niche that it occupied in my life.”
Does it still have that liberating feeling for you now?
Angel: “100 per cent. I listen pretty much only to that stuff, or relistening to our album. I just hope that this album feels like that to someone out there too. What you said about how the genre is looked down upon – I think if you allow yourself to like it for just a couple minutes, you might find that you actually really like EDM. I think a lot of us like EDM and we don’t even know. It’s like Coldplay’s ‘Sky Full Of Stars’ was produced by Avicii. Pop music, obviously, has gone awry a lot, and I didn’t listen to electronic music really at all when I moved to New York – I was like, ‘Guitars, guitars, guitars.’”
What brought you back to electronic music after that period of listening to just guitar music?
Angel: “Honestly, wanting to make music with Lulu. When we started Frost Children, it was just the easier mode of collaborating. We lived in different places at the beginning so it was just easier to make music on your laptop, and then I started to have more friends and go to parties. I just liked dance music again, and it just shifted. I realised I was right all along when I was a kid. I feel like every adult has that moment of, ‘Wait, when I was 13, I was right about everything’. That’s how I felt about dance music in 2021.”
The song ‘Control’ on this album connects to that in a way – you’ve described it as your true selves and it comes from you not caring about perceptions anymore. Were people’s perceptions something in the back of your mind previously?
Angel: “When we released the last two albums [‘Speed Run’ and ‘Hearth Room’], it was the first time that we had any engagement with a critical audience. That’s a really crazy feeling, to be honest. No matter what it is, it’s just crazy to be like, ‘Wow, people are hearing this.’ If you’re not careful as an artist, you might start to make shit with an audience or critic in mind, and that’s a horrible feeling. You’ve just got to not pay attention to that stuff.”
Lulu: “We’re at a point in our career where we know [what we do] is going to take us somewhere awesome, so we don’t really compare ourselves or use perceptions in our headspace. It doesn’t even physically have a space in our heads anymore. We’re not name-searching online being like, ‘What does every single person think about us?’ When I started out, I was curious, when we first started getting attention online. But if you ask any artist, that immediately leads to the most depressed thoughts ever about making art in general and you just gotta go in your own lane.”
On ‘Bound2U’, you call back to ‘Hearth Room’’s ‘Bernadette’, sampling the guitar line from that song. Why did you want to repurpose that?
Lulu: “We like the idea of referencing ourselves – self-sampling, self-referencing, moves time a little bit faster, too. It makes it seem like that song was a long time ago, which is cool. It’s cool to blend those worlds and forget that era.”
Angel: “We’ve switched things up with the band’s sound over the years and, in ‘Sister’, it was the first time we really had this focused thing of, ‘This is not a new thing for us, but it’s the best of everything you’ve heard up to this point and the most streamlined, perfect, idealised version of it.’ Sampling our old songs is a genius way of doing that. We used to be scared about doing the same thing twice, then I remembered I listened to Nirvana’s ‘Nevermind’ all the way through – I love Nirvana, but I was just like, ‘A lot of these songs sound like copy-paste, but they’re all different songs.’ The sound of it is all one thing happening. I wanted to do that with this album and I want to do that with life in general, too.”
You’ve got a couple of collaborations on this record, including Kim Petras on ‘Radio’, which feels like a big get…
Angel: “Yeah, that was cool. We had written ‘Radio’ around the same time as most of these songs, and loved it. Kim reached out over Instagram last year and was like, ‘Let’s make music together.’ I was extremely excited, I love Kim Petras. We were like, ‘OK, yes, we should work on your music. We should make beats and songs for you. But wouldn’t it also be crazy if you hopped on this song?’ She was down and we recorded it in our second session with her in LA. She has that perfect EDM voice, which is no secret. I just feel really proud and happy, and it’s such a good song. Her voice is just pure pop and I want to keep making things with her, for sure.”
What else do you have coming up with her?
Angel: ‘Freak It’, which came out last month, was produced by us and she has a lot more stuff coming. I don’t know how much I’m at liberty to say, but there’s more stuff under the hood, for sure.”
Frost Children’s new album ‘Sister’ is out now via True Panther/Dirty Hit