Wonderland

FROST CHILDREN: THE COLDEST KIDS OUT OF MISSOURI

**Frost Children, the NYC siblings and party instigators, take a daring risk on their third album, SISTER. But nostalgia has a habit of finding the right sentiment.**

What stirs in you when you hear the word sister? A softness, maybe. Comfort. Care. Is it the memory of someone always just around the corner, or the idea of someone who should’ve been? Whether bound by blood or simply by bond, most of us know the shape of a sister – even if we’ve never had one. It’s a holistic connection; one beyond words and always worth celebrating. And that’s just what Frost Children did – it’s what they named their third album, after all.

“Sometimes it feels like you need some sort of friend or companion to get through life,” surmises Lulu Prost, one half of St Louis-raised, NYC-based sibling duo Frost Children. While he speaks, his gaze flickers between the floor and his sister, Angel. “Who that is can take a lot of forms. Things can go wrong and people can drift. But with a sister, there’s a bond for life and there will always be a saving grace. It’s a beautiful thing, and such a complex emotion to have.”

The coldest kids out of Missouri are lounging on the balcony of their Shoreditch hotel, chugging iced coffees like it isn’t the mid afternoon, sheltering from sporadic showers of late summer rain. The siblings are burdened by large suitcases; flying, shortly after our rendez-vous, to Copenhagen for a festival appearance, after a fleeting stop off in the English capital. “The key is organ meat,” the sleek and sophisticated Angel teases wryly, dissecting the pair’s ability to spend large periods of time on the road away from their shared apartment in the Big Apple. “You’ve gotta eat things that they eat in the Bible,” interjects Lulu, shifting his electric teal bed hair out of his hazy blue eyes with a smirk. “And at least seven hours of sleep on tour. Hopefully eight, but you have to get seven. And don’t do drugs. Maybe a glass of whiskey.”

The rise of the disruptive duo has been swift and seamless. After YouTube beat-making and pop punk fascination in their formative years, it was only when Lulu joined Angel in relocating to New York in 2021 during COVID that the Prost’s combined their collective artistry and began releasing music. Once venues re-opened post lockdown, they built a NYC community through buzzy live shows – culminating in their 2024 two day festival Frost Fest – and garnered acclaim with dual yet disparate 2023 LPs. “The idea was to present two albums simultaneously as a total picture of artistry and songwriting,” Angel explains on the quickfire releases of the glitchy and chaotic hyperpop-adjacent SPEED RUN and the sincere, folky Hearth Room. “This is the path that we chose and you have to make what you want to make. I don’t think Lulu and I will ever bend to what’s in fashion.”

New album SISTER, shared 12th September via True Panther/Dirty Hit is undoubtedly their boldest step yet. “We want to push pop music to a sweet, unintellectual era via dance music,” says Angel, explaining the EDM core of SISTER – a return to the siblings’ roots having grown up with “Avicii and Skrillex [taking] over our whole brains.” The manifesto continues: “to make perfect, danceable, pop music that any person in the world could just turn up to. Not clout, not aura, just people dancing, moving and finding love. There’s meaning in that.”

It’s a mission many artists in the contemporary era of dance pop have set out to achieve, but very few successfully — simplicity is one of art’s most compromising challenges. But with the cohesive and sonically encyclopaedic SISTER, the pair have gotten rip-roaringly close. ‘I make it look so easy to live,’ is a repeated lyric declaration from the opening cut “Position Famous” – emblematic of the effortlessly cool exterior of the record’s 14 tracks; the unfiltered, shameless, euphoric hedonism cultivated through strong, driven four-to-the-floor beats and intoxicating, chanted vocal passages.

Written and recorded between Mexico City, London, Philadelphia and Queens, mostly whilst on the road touring, what often started as Angel’s stripped-down guitar balladry metamorphosed into club bangers; a mirroring of classic tracks of the EDM genre such as Avicii’s “Wake Me Up” or Calvin Harris and Sia’s “Titanium”. It’s a style of music that weathers criticism for its lack of originality and often linear structure. But Frost Children spin its formula into something new and exciting, an endless realm of tonal and rhythmic possibility. “Some have written off EDM or dance music as having reached its final form,” Lulu addresses. “But we think us and the people around us are constantly innovating. Dance music is the easiest genre to continue to reinvent. You can literally turn any sound into any other sound.”

The unapologetic and instinctive vision that Frost Children ooze is a rare spectacle; as is the “twin telepathy” that fizzes around their shared artistic atmosphere. SISTER is more than an album – it’s an ode to coming of age, to family and, of course, to dance music. “This is our genre,” Angel concludes, blasé but beaming. “We were thinking about doing other vibes for this next record, but we decided, ‘Let’s just do the shit that we know how to do and what we’ve been knowing how to do since we were 13.’”

What’s that saying? If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Listen to SISTER…