This is your introduction to Frost Children. The New York-based duo made up of brother and sister Angel and Lulu Prost have been actively releasing music under the moniker since the COVID-19 era, but only more recently have they slipped out of the periphery of pop.
Frost Children’s music is a breakneck mutation of the popularly hated ‘YOLO EDM-pop’ (as diagnosed by Kieran Press-Reynolds in Pitchfork) of the early 2010s. Emo-pop or hip-pop refrains are beset with producer tags, air horns, and punishing risers in an effort to create a mammoth sound that empties the discographies of Skrillex, Justice, and Papa Roach into an ‘Evil Post-irony Blender’ and produces something detestable. This is carefully curated cringe.
In the past decade or so, the mainstream tendency towards ‘clean’ acoustic ballads (see: Alex Warren, Taylor Swift, Noah Kahan) has been mirrored by the rise of a (not-so)subculture that venerates maximalism, parody, and revival of the Universal Electropop Dancefloor, or UED (see: Charli XCX, The Dare, Babymorocco, Bassvictim, expanded on here and here by yours truly). Taking tools from hyperpop, ska, and other brash and often-criticised genres such as EDM, these artists represent a metadebauchery. The music abhors the mainstream pop it mobilises against while reproducing itself from the same material. The result is confused, often off-putting, and ultimately irresistible in its disavowal of uniformity or finish.
For Frost Children, this wave is one which has crested in their two sets at Primavera earlier this year; their production credits, which look to be rife on Kim Petras’ new seventh debut album; and their new record SISTER (2025), complete with features from Petras and Babymorocco and a finger-wagging 6.6 from Pitchfork. Still a small operation (just over one million listeners on Spotify), but the industry and public’s appetite for Frost Children betrays a desire for big music when popular sounds, at a glance, are smaller than ever.
What this type of music brings back onto the table is a sense of the sublime. Behind the whiplash beat changes, speed-increases, and general mischief, the main thing one scrapes from the Frost Children discography is immense scale. The palate of these tracks is one which is focused, much like many OG EDM artists’, on establishing a sense of dawning upon, or being dawned upon by, a sound which tests the limits of our sensoria. It is this auditory scale which induces the debaucherous dance-like-we’ll-all-die-tomorrow attitude, a fever symptomatic of sensory overload.
And while this is wildly effective in a club or festival setting, it is similarly riveting through the humble headphone or home speaker. Because while the 6.3-inch display of your iPhone might struggle to visually hit you like a bus with a sense of liberating insignificance, sound is not so easily contained. This is especially true for Frost Children’s shaking-until-it-falls-apart style of pop– your iPhone speaker crackling as it tries in vain to reproduce sounds made to fissure eardrums only taps further into the fatty bombast of the music.
In this sense, Frost Children and their contemporaries have engineered a new style of pop which rewires the insufficient means of the everyday listener to better install a sense of the sublime, something increasingly rare as the rituals of our lives are sanded down by those putrefying forces, comfort and convenience. Listening to this duo, after the initial nausea, hot flashes, blurry vision, etc., reminds the listener that size does matter, insofar as the overwhelming sensation of being reduced to near nothing by razing saw synths makes Teams and LinkedIn feel worlds away. Suspend your gag reflex. Yield to the subwoof (loud speaker-driven noises). Frost Children will blow you(r eardrums) to smithereens!
“Colchester Snow 021210” by HHA124L is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
