Frost Children

Hailing from St. Louis, Missouri, siblings Angel and Lulu Prost grew up listening to the larger-than-life sounds of big room DJs and emo heavyweights of the early 2000s, influenced by their older brother's dubstep collection as well as going to see acts like Virtual Riot at an outdoor amphitheater in their hometown. Their own initial sonic experiments came from "imagining the space music was being played and celebrated in," equipped with the idea that you can transcend the limitations of what's around you. Sending each other stems over voice notes between NYC (where Angel went to university for neuroscience while living in a house that threw DIY shows) and Nashville (where Lulu went to college and would often be commissioned to produce singer-songwriter tracks for $50 a pop), they decamped back to St. Louis during the pandemic where they began to amass a discography of hyperactive sounds. This culminated in the release of last year's critically acclaimed SPIRAL, an electric record that traverses genres from emotive synth-pop to turbulent punk, formed out of the duo's sky's-the-limit aspirations that you can make anything work in pop music.

This past April's True Panther debut SPEED RUN stretched their electronic pop sensibilities even further, and now the ever-prolific and experimental duo have quickly returned with the more unplugged and insular atmospherics of Hearth Room. Written in tandem with SPEED RUN, and serving as its companion release, the new album shows a different side to the duo that trades uptempo synthesizers for acoustic arrangements. Self recorded this Spring in a cabin in the Poconos Mountains, and mixed by Al Carlson (Oneohtrix Point Never, Jessica Pratt, Laurel Halo) in Brooklyn, New York, at first listen the new project can still feel chaotically uneasy, albeit in a way that feels whittled down to the band's emotional core. Lead single "Lethal" belts, "If I had a spine / You'd be mine," an unrequited love ballad inspired by emo and pop punk, but with a sentiment more authentic than mere influence. Frost Children are still young, but they have a way of twisting old favorites into internet anthems. If SPEED RUN was a New York club soundtrack, then Hearth Room is Angel and Lulu's attempt to bring down the BPM and fine-tune the breadth of who they want to be as songwriters.

Even in a slower tempo, Frost Children are still operating at hyperspeed. "Tribeca / Hudson Yards / Bedford Ave & 7th," repeats "Bob Dylan," where cultural touchstones about "the new Jack Harlow bowl at Sweetgreen" become personal anecdotes about smoking cigarettes in the West Village and thinking about what's next until the song and the city cave in on itself. Everything moves faster and faster and faster, even when you're watching from inside your apartment or from behind a screen. What was personally sentimental one day may no longer belong to you. Angel reminisces on the time she took making both projects: "when you love the creation you start to fall in love with the grind of working on it, and once it nears the time of giving it to someone else you kinda want to hold on to it, but it stops being yours." Their ambition is for each to become something greater than the sum of their parts.

Appealing to listeners who love Bill Callahan as much as Skrillex, the songs from both SPEED RUN and Hearth Room represent the oscillating mood shifts while being worked on simultaneously, as well as the myriad of stimulation and emotion that comes from daily life in the city, "sponging up whatever we like about the world," while the world as we know still exists. The dual records represent a time capsule of that moment, shorter in length than a DJ set but perfect for commuting to work or a party, where it's okay to feel everything at once. "The sound keeps changing because our lives keep getting brought to different settings," they explain. It's the listener's choice which one they want to lean into at any given moment.

As they imagine on "Bob Dylan," "he thought about making a song about these places / in an effort to prove to the listener that all art becomes part of the machine." While cultural consumption is inevitable, Frost Children never lose the sense that being emphatically themselves is enough to carve out a meaningful space. Zeroing in on bringing vocals to the front, they control the narration of their hypnotic electronic pop, whether it's sincerity processed through the warped glaze of punctured autotune in "Marigold'' or the blissful, iced-out strings of "Stare At The Sun," which breaks down the fragile barrier that comes with imagining what's possible. With that, comes commitment: "you just gotta own it," the duo reflects. "Never delete anything!"