Frost Children

Lulu: We love London, we’re only here for the week. We leave on Monday.
Angel: We have to get back for tour.
Lulu: It’s more emo than New York in a way that I like.
Angel: It’s more preppy.
Lulu: Honestly, I just feel so close with our friends here.
Angel: It’s also kind of dance music heaven, I feel historically and now, it just feels like the freshest dance shit is happening here. In a way that really anywhere in America has never had locked down. It’s inspiring.

Angel: Grass is always greener. But we love travelling in general, we get really skittish when we’re home for too long. And this is similar enough to home that it just kind of feels like a second home.
Lulu: Being in hotels, I feel like it always keeps us inspired. It’s nice being shoved in a little hotel room and just working on beats. You feel like you’re doing something exciting.

Angel: It’s going to be lit. Bringing a bunch of new lights, new versions of songs. I’m honestly just really excited. We’ve done a couple of record-store performances and signings for small crowds. I just walk off feeling like these are the best songs ever made. These songs are meant to be played live, I’m beyond excited.

Angel: Pop music artists. We’re siblings. Performers, writers, producers, everything.
Lulu: Co-owners and founders of Purple Label, the new Frost Children vanity label.

Lulu: Personally? I would introduce myself as (laughs)… I actually have no idea how to introduce myself. I’ve never done this really.
Angel: Well, our personal lives are so married to our working lives at this point.
Lulu: I would say — Lulu, half of Frost Children, aka DJ Woe, aka New York Legend.
Angel: I’m an angel emoji, Frost Prost, one half Frost Children, one of New York’s finest thinkers of the modern era.

Angel: It was pretty normal.
Lulu: It was probably as normal as it gets.
Angel: I feel very happy about it, middle class. I was shy, a loner, made beats a lot. I was really good at school. I studied a lot. I got a scholarship to move to New York. Pretty normal, but pretty solitary, I would say.
Lulu: Neither of us partied really, in high school. You know, maybe one or two parties in total. I feel like we were each other’s best friends throughout it all, and our older brother.

Angel: We’ve always been pretty close. I mean, when you’re a younger person, the age differences are more stark, you know? So, when I was in sixth grade Lulu was in fourth grade.

Angel: There’s a craving to kind of get out of it, that’s the main thing. If you’re an artist, you kind of want to just leave. No one understands you type thing. When I moved to New York and I started meeting people that were born in New York or LA, it was almost unfathomable to me. To me childhood and adolescence is wanting to escape. I can’t imagine being born in a place where you’re just like, yeah, this is awesome, and I love everyone. Sweet. I think a lot of artists I admire that come from forgotten cities have that sense of: I don’t belong here, you know? And as a teenager, that’s your MO. That’s why you do everything. Because you’re like, no one understands me, I’m a freak, I’m not like y’all.
Lulu: Not only is it very desolate, but you’re also not encouraged to express yourself freely. Doing that sets you up for a lot of bullying and scrutiny because you’re like the only person in the town that is being a normal, expressive human being. It literally is seen as cringe to be an independent character and a lot of people learn that in their brains, then they completely evaporate that person inside and then they grow up without it. It’s tragic.

Angel: No, it wasn’t always the goal. I always admired New York. I had such a prep-school fantasy my whole life, where I was like, I want to go to anywhere that has this sort of academic, collegiate vibe. There’s like a bunch of things that probably spawned that.
Lulu: I guess for me, I feel like my instinct as an aspiring pop producer when I was like seventeen, I thought Nashville was a cool idea and there was a music school there, and so I ended up going to music school in Nashville and that ended up being a complete flop. I had some good times, maybe, but it was a very, not pleasurable city.

Lulu: Yeah, we just got an apartment in South Williamsburg.

Angel: It was 2016, I guess five years?

Angel: I feel like we got closer honestly, because the times that we would see each other, breaks and holidays and stuff, I’d just hang out with Lulu more and kind of realise that we were better friends than we thought when we were younger.

Lulu: I think the thing is we did have a community there, and we still are close with everyone, but everyone is just sporadically everywhere now. So, it’s like when we go home, we have a couple friends to kick it with.
Angel: But everybody’s lit now, so everyone’s also doing tours and shit.

Angel: No.
Lulu: To St. Louis? Nah.
Angel: I mean, I feel two ways about it. I do think your spirit or your soul has some kind of connection to the grounds that you were raised in. In some ways, I wouldn’t mind being buried in the same place I was born. It just feels right. At the same time, places are just places. And when you live in New York, you really realise that. You have to learn that a block in Manhattan is just a block of concrete that is impartial to you.
Lulu: It’s like the saying “Your home is wherever the community is.”
Angel: But I do feel like a special part of my heart is reserved for our fans in St. Louis. I feel like we get comments all the time that say: “Why don’t you play in your hometown?” I want to! It’s just booking is hard, the geography of it is tough. But I feel for them, I want to go back for them at some point.

Lulu: I always talk about for fun how it’d be cool to live in the Pacific Northwest when I’m older and have a house in the trees. But honestly, I’m going to feel alone and depressed there.
Angel: Just leave that for the afterlife. This is the thing about New York, it’s why it’s awesome. You’re going to die someday and then you’ll be in paradise. So that’s why you don’t need to make heaven on earth. It should be a little fucked up and uncomfortable until the last moment.
Lulu: No definitely, ideally after decades of touring, I’ll get a really, really nice flat in Upper West Side Manhattan, right by Central Park. Exactly what John Lennon did and have a husky and go to the park.
Angel: As long as I want to live in America, I think it’s going to be there.

Lulu: I hate the country, I love the people.
Angel: I love America. It raised me, I love myself, I am an American. Obviously, I don’t love a lot of this stuff happening, but Americans are really cool. The instinct has been there to say, fuck all of this, I’m being an expat, but I think it’s important for someone like me to actually stay in America and make it work. There’s too many people here to give up, I actually think it would be a very American thing of me to give up.

Lulu: Honestly, a lot of it has grown in the past couple of years where our intention of what we want to do with the music has like figured itself out as we did it. Now, it’s more just an expression of how we feel dance music needs to be, the necessity. And not even just dance music — pop music, melodies. It almost feels like we have this urge, this responsibility to make music sound a certain way before we die.
Angel: I do feel like this holy mission thing where I’m like, it’s going to be us that do it. I don’t envision anyone doing it the same way that we’re doing it, not even in a vain way. It’s at our fingertips to start puppeteering it now.

Angel: It should be balanced.
Lulu: It should be quality. If you’re making pop music, you should be ready to have a pop-star persona. I don’t like pop stars that are like, I’m just a good guy, I’m just like you. If you’re going to make pop music, be a pop star. Be a level above.
Angel: There’s fantasy. You’re not like anyone else. A pop star on the radio should be untouchable. I think in pop music my philosophy is that there should be one weird thing. When you go over one, then you’re in the dreaded hyperpop territory. People criticise us about this sometimes when they say it’s not adding enough newness to the genre or something, which obviously I disagree with. The thing is, pop music isn’t supposed to do that. It’s not supposed to be forward-moving, fuck all the rest. The best pop songs are half rooted in something your brain already knows.

Angel: I think obviously Kim Petras is killing it. I think Gaga. She embodies that too where the production choices are always weird enough to make you ask, what is this? I’ve never heard something like this, but melodies kind of get you there, in the familiar kind of way.
Lulu: Rihanna. They both have this sort of I’m larger than life quality.
Angel: I think Zedd and Yasutaka Nakata are the goats of EDM-inspired pop music.
Lulu: Obviously Britney, she made the blueprint for that kind of pop star. Madonna, they’re the obvious ones.
Angel: I’m trying to think of any men. Let’s not forget about the men, y’all.

Lulu: I don’t think it means anything sonic, I think the sound of punk is completely different. You could apply that term to any genre and essentially it means creative freedom. You’re just not focused on perception.

Angel: (Laughs) I don’t know, I don’t know about us. I like pop music too much and I feel like the word punk can be kind of antithetical to pop.

Angel: Because to be pop is dealing in familiarity and universalness. I think Lulu and I are interested in what can make the biggest crowd of people dance, like Gaga in Brazil last summer. You don’t get there by being like, I’m punk. You have to be punk in the production but at the same time, if you’re just like, fuck any expectations, fuck any assumptions you have about me, fuck all that, then enjoy playing to no one. If you care about other people and if you want people to like you, you have to at some point listen. That’s not to say that I think that we’re not punk. I just wouldn’t say that we are or we’re not.

Angel: Punk has a place too. It’s fuck you music. Noise music. Punk music is being thirteen and being like, no one out there got me. But Breaking Benjamin, they got me. It’s rare. It feels special to you, it feels like no one else gets it quite like you. It’s like a medicine, you know? Pop music feels like smiling and, like, acceptance of everything.
Lulu: But that’s the thing, are they really that different? Maybe that is the same thing — acceptance and relatability. It just depends on the person coming into it. I think they do share a lot of ideas, but one is more focused on fuck the world and the other is we all live in the world, so let’s make it awesome.

Angel: What I feel when I’ve got fondness for something I like. When I hear a song that’s super inspirational and I need to get to the studio right away and try to recreate it for fun, that kind of childlike excitement.
Lulu: I feel like tenderness to me is uncovering the veil — for a brief moment — to someone that you feel close to. People talk about how Marilyn Monroe, when she was with her friends, she didn’t talk like Marilyn Monroe, she talked like Norma Jeane. She could turn on the Monroe effects.

Angel: I think it’s more exaggerations to be honest, I don’t think I’ve ever presented a version of myself that’s fabricated.
Lulu: Definitely not.
Angel: I agree with what Lulu was saying, but at the same time, I’m like, I don’t know if I can even take off this veil. I feel like this is me, you know? And same with you. Even when we say that we should do something, we need to chill, we need to take a break, it just ends up being related to Frost Children. It would be very hard for me to adopt a different lifestyle.

Lulu: We had a couple other ones. Yeah. We were going to call it Twin, which is a similar kind of ethos but I think sister is more universal.
Angel: More tender. We also wanted to call it Emotional Dance Music for a while, which feels like its genre. That’s a good way to describe it. I have this in my Notes app, I wanted to call it #Swag at one point and then obviously Justin Bieber named his album “Swag.” I could have been first.

Angel: If you’re talking about the word itself, I feel like it could have been called brother too. Lulu’s my brother, and ultimately it’s an album about us.
Lulu: To be honest, I just feel like the easy answer is that it’s a little bit too masculine.
Angel: This kind of music has a feminine touch to it. And then there’s “Hey Brother” by Avicii, it feels too rustic.
Lulu: It’s like, oh brother.
Angel: Or brotherhood. If I had to describe our fan base or the world of dance music fans, it doesn’t feel like a brotherhood. It does to some people, for sure, but to me, in my fantasy world of who’s in a crowd? It’s a sisterhood.

Lulu: Time, honestly.
Angel: Time and a soul kinship. A similar mission.
Lulu: Sometimes you don’t think about it too hard, you just want to spend more time with this person. Even if it’s a slow burn and the first time you meet they’re a good person, a cool person. But then maybe the second or third time you hang out it’s like, oh wait, we’re really connected.
Angel: And sometimes it’s the opposite, sometimes a person got me in a place, they had me for a moment and no one else was present. That’s a sister for life. One of the most beautiful EDM experiences that I had before Frost Children was when I went to a Virtual Self concert by myself in 2018, which is Porter Robinson’s side project. No one else wanted to go with me, no one else fucking knew who he was. And instantly, when I got there, someone in the crowd asked me: “Are you here by yourself?” I said yes and they said: “There’s a group of like five of us, we all just met each other now because we all came alone. Do you want to hang out with us?” I’ve never seen them again. I have no intention of ever seeing them. I don’t even remember their names, but that was a moment where it felt like, you got me. And I feel like there’s this sort of corny, very naive sense of sisterhood in the EDM world which is —  I don’t fucking know you, but we’re locked in. I do love that about dance music, where it’s the most molly-brained — you and me, we know, we know what we’re saying.

Angel: Yeah, definitely a big feeler.
Lulu: As much as sometimes I try to lock in, I can’t drown out feelings and be like a robot. There’s always a lot of emotion in everything we do.
Angel: That’s the beautiful thing about EDM too, that lyrical motif throughout the 2010s, that was obviously inspired by the recession, which is that you don’t know what tomorrow brings, so enjoy right now.
Lulu: (Laughs) There’s this Pitbull quote which is so sick. “Life is not a waste of time, time is not a waste of life. So let’s not waste any time, get wasted and have the time of our lives.”

Lulu: Movies, family, and music.
Angel: The last time I sobbed because of something, it’s always on a plane, too, because when you’re up in the air, you’re more likely to cry, I was listening to Krewella. They have this song called “Live for the Night.” I was taking off on a plane in LA at the same moment that the drop hit and I just felt the most vulnerable I’ve ever been.
Lulu: I was crying recently remaking “Fade Into Darkness” by Avicii for fun. I was just listening to the melody on loop and I just started crying. That melody is so simple, it just goes up and down a chord, it has so much emotion to me. I don’t know what it is. It’s so euphoric but also melancholy, that melody is the ethos of EDM.
Angel: And that’s what I said with pop music, balance. It can’t just be happy. It can’t be like, I’m walking down the street and I’m happy and cool. It’s got to say I’m walking down the street and I’m happy and I’m cool because I learned how to overcome all the terror.

Angel: I care about family. I care about trans people. I think it’s a beautiful world, but scary people are in it. I care about our trans fans. I want to make the world a better place for us and them.
Lulu: I care about bringing people together with music. More than anything, more than making cool sounds or making cool beats.

Lulu: Just more of that, honestly. I think that we’re going to have a career where people aren’t going to remember us for a specific thing we did. It’s going to be a lifetime.
Angel: Like Nine Inch Nails. It’s not because of one big song or one big album. You get this overall impression. An absolute, never-relenting lifetime of doing it over and over and over and over and over again, despite anyone saying to do any differently. Those are the types of people that we’re both inspired by. Also, I want to be president, lowkey.