I think our music sounds the way it does because we're so similar as people. It's like a feedback loop. There's no one in the room to stop us.

TESS POLLOK: Take me back to the beginning. How did you get started with Frost Children?

ANGEL PROST: It began at birth, technically. We're siblings.

POLLOK: Who's older and who's younger?

PROST: She's younger. I'm 24 and she's 22 [Lulu, her bandmate], but we're both born around the same time. She's March 5th, 2000, and I'm March 10th, 1998. So we're almost exactly two years apart. Growing up, we had a lot of favorite bands, and we'd play at youth concerts and do covers of our favorites.

POLLOK: Who did you guys start off covering?

PROST: Green Day, Blink-182. We did a lot of the Scott Pilgrim music.

POLLOK: That's awesome. Like Metric?

PROST: Yeah, exactly. I was really into Wolf Mother, too. Muse, Breaking Benjamin, Fall Out Boy. It was kind of, like, we'd be in a band for three months, stop, start another – on and off while we were teenagers. For awhile we were doing our own thing. Then I moved to New York in 2016, Lulu moved to Nashville and then St. Louis. At one point I was in a couplle of bands but nothing too serious. And, yeah, then the pandemic happened and we reunited at our childhood home.

POLLOK: Which is where?

PROST: St. Louis, Missouri.

POLLOK: So you reunited in St. Louis during the pandemic. So Frost Children is one and a half years old?

PROST: According to the numbers. Frost Children started in 2019, that was when we first uploaded music – we made a Christmas single together, completely as a joke. It was a cover of a Fall Out Boy song, "You'll Shoot Your Eye Out." When the pandemic happened we started making more music together and we were, like, "Let's make this a real thing, let's put out a real EP," and we did in May of that year. Lulu moved to New York in 2022 and we've been living together and performing ever since.

POLLOK: I didn't realize you guys lived together, too.

PROST: Yeah, we spend all day together almost every day.

POLLOK: And how is it making music with your sister? Are you ever, like, "I just want to kill you so much?”

PROST: Honestly, no, people always ask me that, but no. It's always good. We get into minor skirmishes here and there but they're always really vanilla, like, one of us will be in kind of a bad mood. I admire the fuck out of Lulu. I'm just amazed by what she does. Making music in our situation is so easy because it feels like your brain is just doubled – it's not even collaborating, it's like having two of your own brain.

POLLOK: Yeah. Do you think it's a big part of your guys' sound that you're twin-like, or symmetrical in some ways?

PROST: Totally. I think it's a huge part of the reason our music is so exaggerated. I think our music sounds the way it does because we're so similar as people. It's like a feedback loop. There's no one in the room to stop us. Even if we're going in a chill direction, like, we're going over the top with the chill. We edit things down sometimes, but usually it just builds. It's more building it out than anything else. We've done some sessions with other artists, but I don't have the sense of collaboration with them that I have with Lulu.

POLLOK: Is there anything you're working on right now that you'd want people to know about?

PROST: We're working on two projects right now. I'm not sure when they'll be out, I have a date in mind. But something I've learned from doing interviews is not to say, because people expect it and then it doesn't happen. All I can say is we're working on two projects right now and they'll be out soon.

POLLOK: Okay. And do you want to get into what they are at all or do you want to leave it a complete mystery?

PROST: There's an album which is a little bit of everything. Did you listen at all to our first album, Spiral?

POLLOK: Yeah, I did. It was awesome.

PROST: It's a lot like that, except we're maturing into our sound more, I think. It goes up and down and all the directions – we're not losing any of that – but it's evolving in a way that feels more business-like, mature, and bureaucratic.

POLLOK: Are you guys signed with a label yet? Is anyone releasing it?

PROST: There might be one for the next one, but up until this point we've been independent. We have a really flexible distribution deal with someone right now, which basically just means they distribute and promote our music, but we still own all of it.

POLLOK: That's nice. The creative freedom that comes with that must be nice.

PROST: Totally. I haven't felt any of the cliché feelings of, like, "Oh, my label wants me to do this, but I want to do this," or any of that. No matter what happens in the future with label and music business stuff, it's nice that we have our own equipment to make, produce, and record music. That wasn't a thing, classically, with record label structures for awhile – usually you need a company to step in and be, like, "We see potential in you, and will give you this equipment since we think you can potentially sell records." Obviously, we need money to live and to travel and stuff like that. But we can always make music ourselves and record on our own. We literally do everything in house, we make everything in our house. We just need to pay rent and buy food, maybe upgrade our equipment in the long run. I could see us doing something with a label if the deal was right, but, yeah, we'll see.

POLLOK: Very chill attitude.

PROST: Yeah. I'm not going to say yes to the first thing, you know?

POLLOK: That's smart. It's very communist of you guys to own the means of production.

PROST: We do. We own the means of production, publication, and distribution. We do our own visuals, Lulu's a really talented 3D artist on Blender, I designed the vinyl sleeve – oh, something I have to promote is that we're doing a vinyl release of Spiral in December 2022. I did the design and layout and track listing – I designed our merch, also.

POLLOK: Nice, so your whole enterprise is DIY top to bottom.

PROST: We have this artist called Snailwar who does the other visuals. She did a 2D music video for "Fox Bop," she's really talented. We just met her online. But other than that, visually and musically, it's just us.

POLLOK: What was on your mind when you came up with Spiral?

PROST: I was trying to loosely arrange it around the idea that Lulu and I were in a cult and that we had a moment of clarity where we, like, woke up one morning and realized, "Shit, we're in a cult." It's about us learning how to get out of that and the pain that comes from leaving something familiar and the excitement that comes from realizing you've been trapped in a toxic relationship of sorts, imagining a cult as a dramatic version of that escape. The pacing of the album is really hyper and intense, there's a lot of moments of me realizing that I'm a selfish person and wanting desperately to escape from this thing, whatever it is. We have a song "Worship You" that's kind of a breakup song but with a cult leader. But it's a loose concept, and nothing too high concept ever really works, I think the best way to do it is just arrange songs around a certain arc of emotions that can kind of be applied to any storyline. I think from the audience's perspective there's always a sense of hyperintentionality with music, but that's not always the case. As a listener, I'm always, like, "Oh, they chose these things that happen in a song on purpose," when in the end a lot of it is just you being yourself and putting things randomly together. Sometimes I don't know how I'm feeling and I look at the music to see how I'm feeling, and it becomes a way of learning about yourself through making things.

POLLOK: Was there anything going on in your life that made you think about cults and breaking free of cults? Were you breaking free of something?

PROST: We made the album in a tiny apartment in Williamsburg. So there's a sense of it being frenetic and claustrophobic and wanting to get out of this box. I was in a relationship at the time and it ended shortly after the album came out, I guess there's something to be said about that, but, in general it's about the pain of maturing and escaping preconceived notions of oneself, learning to live with certain things about yourself...this arc of taking off a blindfold, being able to be yourself. In a lot of ways it's just about aging and looking back at yourself and being like, "Wow, I can't believe I thought that," or "Wow, I can't believe I wanted to wear that two years ago.”

POLLOK: It reminds me of a bildungsroman in books, you know, when the protagonist is on a journey to mature and grow and change.

PROST: Definitely. With our upcoming projects it's very similar.

POLLOK: I think that's great. Something I carry with me when I do these profiles is some advice my friend Peter Vack gave me about not talking about work before it's finished because it's like letting air out of a balloon, it takes the pressure off the work that helps it to build. It's almost too gratifying to talk about something before it's done.

PROST: I think also with that, you're less able to make crucial edits. At this point we're able to completely change anything about upcoming projects, but if we talk about it we lose that independence. I think in general with Frost Children, there's always a story being told, in its own way.

POLLOK: What's the ideal setting to listen to Frost Children? Like if you had to imagine a setting for Frost Children to be playing, what would you imagine?

PROST: Huge festival stage outside...in Miami. Massiva ultra music festival with a bunch of people that have never heard this kind of music ever that are open to hearing anything. That's the ideal place, in my mind.

POLLOK: So you want to expose people to something new – or shock them with something that they haven't heard before?

PROST: Yeah, I wouldn't say shock is the right word, but it's close to that. Shock is, like, really punk rock – shock is, like, "Oh, you've heard of guitars? Well, they sound like this now." It's more about accepting that I like things without embarrassment, to be able to say I like this kind of music, not even ironically. To me, irony doesn't exist. I hate when you like something but you're like, "Oh, this is a stain on my taste," or, having the feeling that if you like a certain thing you're not a serious person – you're judging yourself from a hypothetical perspective, a third person perspective.

POLLOK: Your take on irony is that it's a form of self-cynicism?

PROST: Yeah, exactly. If I can make something that frees someone from that, something that makes them go, "Maybe this is weird to like, but, you know what, it's actually cool that I like it," that's kind of the purpose of it all to me. When I started thinking that irony wasn't real, that anything I liked was genuine, it felt so liberating. Like realizing cringe isn't real.

POLLOK: I am cringe. I am free.

PROST: Exactly. We've had this idea for awhile – do you know YouTube poop? I thought it would be so cool to present YouTube poops in a fancy theater. Suits required with oysters and champagne. I was explaining it to someone as it's, like, lowbrow presented in a highbrow context. And he told me, "That idea sucks," and he said it was because I was calling it lowbrow and you're putting it on this pedestal of being highbrow, when really you should just be presenting it as high art. Which is true. I only said lowbrow because I was presenting it to someone and I didn't want them to think I identified with this quote unquote lowbrow art.

POLLOK: It's fascinating how in the early 00s of the internet there was so much content being unselfconsiously produced, memes and YouTube poops and all of that. And it's all being regurgitated now, I know Spike put out an issue on memes and posting last year. I know that everyone thinks their era of art is brand new because they're making it, but that time was really so special – and it's fascinating to watch that material be regurgitated in a fine art context, because that stuff is the most artistic accomplishment of the last few decades. Have you seen the OG YouTube poop, the Waluigi's castle one?

PROST: I know, that's a constant soundboard.

POLLOK: Did you ever play flash games on albinoblacksheep.com?

PROST: No, but I remember that. I think I played a few games. Every half-year has its meme moment and it's meme language, it changes every six months or so. The internet era, the last 25 to 30 years, is – the internet is just a new sense, it's like a deity. A new god that exists in our life that didn't before.

POLLOK: Did you and your sister grow up online or were you an offline household?

PROST: Online, for sure. We played sports and stuff but I was always making YouTube videos, uploading to Soundcloud. I highly recommend anyone reading to go listen, I think it aged really well.

POLLOK: How old were you when you started putting that out?

PROST: I was 13. My first song was called Let's Get Fruity. It was about Froot Loops. I was on YouTube a lot – I completely missed Tumblr – but I remember Smosh and EpicMealTime.

POLLOK: Oh my god, I remember Smosh and EpicMealTime.

PROST: Those were my heroes. Even Rebecca Black. Recently, I got a bacon strips & bacon strips & bacon strips & bacon strips & bacon strips shirt because that was their OG shirt. It's my favorite shirt right now.

POLLOK: My friend sent me a great one last week, it wasn't Fred but it was of that era – remember the muffins video, where they're, like, try my muffins! It was the same person who did "Shoes. Oh my god. Shoes.”

PROST: A lot fhe humor in our music, the glitchiness and the siliness, comes out of that era. Also, just the way that life was being, like, remixed right in front of your eyes. "Climbin' in your windows/ Snatching your people up." Looking back on that one it was so not okay – like, these two white dudes remixed this guy's trauma. But that was really inspiring to us.

POLLOK: Some of what was permissible then is really crazy to think about now. I really love 3oh!3 and I was listening to them the other day and I was really blown away by how much the songs are just, like, about rape on a surface level – they have songs that are, like, "I'm waiting for the really drunk girl to be alone/ I'm gonna get her.”

PROST: A remember a year ago, 3oh!3, love the sound of this - you start to play and they start singing and you're like this fucking sucks.

POLLOK: I had a whole spiral about their song Electroshock, have you heard it? It might be on their self-titled album. You should totally listen to it because it's giving Frost Children a little, not in the subject matter at all, but in the sound.

PROST: Yeah, I mean, we love that production style, I definitely will check it out.

POLLOK: I became briefly obsessed with it as a Y2K anthem beacuse it's just about rape, it's just about the feeling of power you get to have a musician – this is, like, blowing my mind because I'm enjoying this song so much. It's totally fucked up but it's incredibly revealing of what people were actually thinking – I feel like people haven't really changed that much, it was just more permissible to talk about it.

PROST: Well, no one ever really stopped thinking like that.

POLLOK: The honesty of it is appealing, at least, to know what you're listening to.

PROST: My friend Harrison just made this song called Girls and it has that sound, and it's about being really into girls – but it's done correctly. It's edgy, it's on the edge, but it's great.

POLLOK: Did you ever listen to hellogoodbye?

PROST: I should listen to them more, they're in the circuit, for sure.

POLLOK: They were right at the intersection of twee and emo and they had this really crazy, like, if Vampire Weekend was a Hot Topic band kind of vibe.

PROST: I really need to listen. That's a great description.

[Being independent] has been really great. I haven't felt any of the cliché feelings of, like, “Oh, my label wants me to do this, but I want to do this.” No matter what happens in the future, it's nice that we have our own equipment to make, produce, and record music.

POLLOK: And Never Shout Never.

PROST: Oh, Never Shout Never is huge inspo right now. A touchstone.

POLLOK: I'm in trouble I'm an addict/ I'm addicted to this girl.

PROST: I've heard that song specifically, probably 17 times in the last few days. We're actually doing a cover of it on Saturday, we're playing a twee show. Emo tee, like Warped Tour twee – and also freak folk twee, like New York 2000s, Moldy Peaches, early White Stripes, Jeffrey Lewis. That was all really inspiring to me. We kind of straddle the two scenes of indie rock and hyper pop – which is perfect, to me. For our twee set we're bringing ukeleles.

POLLOK: Rawr means I love you in dinosaur.

PROST: Also, that song, "Curse of Curves.”

POLLOK: Cute is What We Aim For. Okay, you've kind of already answered this, but who are your biggest artistic influences?

PROST: I have touchstones that are always inspirations and then binges where I dive into a certain band really hard for, like, five months. My longterm inspos are David Berman, Silver Jews, Pavement, My Chemical Romance, Deadmau5, Skrillex, Say Anything, Gary Wilson. Current inspos, talking about more right now, Jeffrey Lewis, Grouper, Grace Ives, The Dare, Blaketheman1000 –

POLLOK: Oh, I love him, he just played at a Forever Magazine reading. I like that he pops up all the time and it's always random shit, there's always some guy on a megaphone, like, "Buy a milady! And here's Blaketheman1000!"

PROST: Yeah, totally, that's part of his serve.

POLLOK: I'm always ready for it. I'm always in the mood.

PROST: It's something we share, that we both love to play a lot, and it just becomes a part of the serve. He's also technically my manager, and he's great as a manager – he was a friend first and then music stuff started happening and he co-manages us with another person, Andrew. He has a great sense of scenes and communities in New York. He's always engaging everyone at least a little bit, it's really inspiring to me – we have the same worldview, that everyone deserves to be engaged with. It's an amazing thing to have in a friend and manager.