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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.