EntitiesResearch and Development

TITLE: FROST CHILDREN
DATE: 17-11-24
TIME: 20:58
COLLABORATOR: FROST CHILDREN
AUTHORS: FIN COUSINS, SAM HARDING
DESIGNERS: YUSUF S.BOZKURT,
MANGA NGCOBO
WORD COUNT: 3399
IMAGE COUNT: 4
TAGS:  X

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ARTICLE ID: TWIST004PARA–TEX/IEP-01/FROST/012/013-020

Are Frost Children in the room with us right now?

This question is at the back of my mind as we meet backstage on the Bristol leg of their Double-Headed Tour across the continent. A hallucinatory line of enquiry. Or maybe I’m just star-struck, as if caught up in the whizzing album art from their first 2023 LP, Speed Run. That record introduced many fans to a duo already doing laps with their musical identity, picking up genre-tags like coins on Rainbow Road, filtering their lyrics and personas through this sonic drift. An approach less elusive than hyperactive, and yet with the same disorienting outcome— by the end of 2023 it was almost as if they had become a different outfit altogether.

This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to why encountering them IRL is such a trippy experience.

Hailing from St Louis, Missouri, and currently operating out of New York City, Frost Children, a duo formed by siblings Angel and Lulu, are not twins. And yet in person it’s hard to shake this impression. Sort of. Which is to say that they are both the spitting image of their internet avatars, or vice versa. Where their presence both physically and online feels like a mash-up of these dimensions, a hyperreal blend of digital and down-to-earth, like characters out of Scott Pilgrim Vs The World. This is inflected by their casual but graphic style of dress, which fuses preppy ensembles with all-caps SWAG, the rawness of indie sleaze with accessory builds straight out of Club Penguin. The result is a refined patchwork, a digital logic of remixed eras, genres and outsized affects that both punctures the virtual pop-star bubble while infusing it with a different, unpolished sheen, one that comes across like a reflection of all the XP points earned from using the internet as your mic, mirror and wardrobe.

The kids are calling it aura.

It’s a term with all the vague nuance of ‘vibe’, which itself has come to function as an increasingly layered shorthand for when something exists between different labels or states. AKA the various textures of the internet. And it was once diagnosed by the writer Walter Benjamin as a term on the outs. He ascribed it to the intangible but formalised quality surrounding original works of art, predicting its inevitable decline in the age of photography. And yet in a contemporary landscape where celebrity dominates as the cheap imitation of this rarefied measure, these days ‘aura’ is being re-asserted as a roundabout means of describing authenticity in the online era. A contradiction in terms, and yet one that expresses just how fine-grained the digital performance of identity has become, an endlessly moderated, gamified and pathologised balancing act between the angles of candid and staged, ironic and sincere, the never-ending spiral of main character syndrome.

Angel sums it up in post-modern vignette. “Like, I just posted a picture of this burger. Is that too real? Should I not be posting normal shit like that? Should I be posting more mysterious shit? But then you post too much mysterious shit. You’re like, well, now I’m not a real person and now I’m just like this weird entity that no one really connects with.”

Just another day at the aura factory.

This now-universal condition among the generations that grew up perpetually online has become a raw site of pop music’s particular obsession with fame, artifice and authenticity, as well as an even more entangled dance of public perception between art, artist and audience. An often fraught dynamic that Frost Children treat with a refreshing literal-mindedness, bordering on a kind of live experiment or performance art that brings these virtual measures of life in the digital panopticon back down to earth.

From placing her aura under laboratory conditions, scrutinising it through such variables as going without showering to just logging off the internet (for a week), Angel in particular has ritualised her Instagram feed as the altar of her online celebrity, extending to the act of ‘eating her fans’ by soliciting animal organ donations from attendees at their live shows across the US. The premise of Frost Children’s ‘Europe is Real’ Tour perhaps says it best, a headline that articulates just how unmoored from reality our online world has become, while simultaneously offering a positive existentialist spin on the matrix we choose to believe in.

Where maybe the real Europe is the friends we made along the way. 

In what currently stands as the most overt expression of these various conceptual strands in their discography, ‘Bob Dylan’ is a cut off their latest LP that takes the form of a spoken-word spiral through the titular songwriter’s late-stage identity crisis. Not only does this Bob Dylan lament the loss of all the once-punk, now-gentrified neighbourhoods of the West, but his very perspective in this song is testament to the fact that he now exists as an avatar, a figurine of his glory days, liable at any moment to be remixed into a TikTok trend for a generation who only know him as a meme.

“It’s like a nightmare from Bob Dylan’s perspective,” elaborates Angel. “He’s conscious of his place in the world and what he’s known for. And when you get conscious of something like that, you start to want to either subvert it completely or you want to lean into it.” This dichotomy represents a familiar impasse, and yet also summarises Angel and Lulu’s operative logic: Do Both. 

In this way the artist known as Frost Children comes across as both a canvas and a brush, puppet and puppeteer, embracing a slippage between these states as a circuitous form of control.  

In an era where we can all be AI Drake or SpongeBob Ross and pretend to be someone else entirely, the decision to embrace the blurred lines of being your own avatar creates a far more malleable set of possibilities that tease out the endless contradictions of life online.

The looseness of this conceit also allows the music to stand on its own terms without relying on parody or self-referentiality. “We’re big believers in ‘no context needed’, especially in a live context,” explains Lulu, whose softer-spoken demeanour in person underscores just how many voices they channel across the duo’s track-list, an emoji-like range they first bottled on their breakthrough LP Spiral. From crippling shyness to mosh-conducting braggadocio to screaming fits to alternative crooning to nonsensical ear-worms, the overall coherence of their palette is assured by its underlying post-ironic spirit, an attitude that is arch but never insincere.

At the end of the day, the deception that Frost Children’s music winks at is one that could be suspected of any artist today, in the faint possibility that it might all have been recorded on balloon instruments and then remixed in post. This tightrope of suspended disbelief is about as thin as the line that separates Frost Children from their actual identities as Angel and Lulu Prost, with only the slice between F and P dividing them from their amalgamated persona. The whole premise is almost too perfect, a semantic cheat code that lets them toggle between art and artist at will, pitting them against one another and unlocking dizzying new combos in the process.

If I’m seeing double, so are you.

At breakneck speed, the siblings enacted a pivot in 2023, releasing dual albums. The electric Speed Run dropped on the 14th of April. Six months later, on the 17th of November, the introspective and intimate Hearth Room was borne. But the time between these six months is also deceptive, creating a gap that never truly existed. “We were making both albums at the same time and trying to figure out which one came first”, Lulu recalls. “We were wondering how we paint the narrative for it, but by the time it was coming out, you naturally want to focus on the next thing, because you’ve already been sitting with it”. This dual narrative unfolded into a hydra: two projects, twins of each other; one icier, one warmer. But it also went beyond doubleheaded musicality and bled into live contexts—the shows that first earned Frost Children their name amongst the Substack-chronicled post-pandemic scene of Dimes Square, New York, which saw other blossoming starlets, The Dare, Blaketheman, The Hellp, and many others. It was a fabled movement that used a surge of post-pandemic energy to clout-max at unprecedented speed.

Characteristic of Dimes Square graduates, Angel and Lulu began threading the dual narrative into live contexts. They released tour posters that placed not only the two albums side by side, but also themselves, in a mischievous act of mirroring.

“We offloaded the job of opening to ourselves”, Angel says. “You want to keep control of your vision and your project. So, the double-headed idea feels kind of possessive. It’s funny. Rather than finding the perfect collaborator, it’s more like... the perfect collaborator is us”. It’s cutting cultural satire. Today, we’re endlessly told we’re going to lose our jobs to AI avatars and confronted by a time of masks and the hard-to-decipher—virtual influencers, deepfakes, political puppetry. Knock-off Balenciaga bags became so much cooler than the real thing that Balenciaga started making knock-offs of knock-offs. FKA Twigs appeared in front of the US Senate to gain control of her virtual self. Models are walking runways for Margiela and “KidSuper styled” as wooden puppets. DJs are becoming Paris Hilton at Tomorrowland-esque clouted dummies, and everyone knows it. And do we really care? Why would we?

We live in an uncanny world of doubles, where we grapple with our images on devices and wonder if we should succumb to the pleasure of letting them take over our lives.

The Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup from 1933 features a famous ‘mirror scene’, in which a spy, Harpo, breaks into the house of Groucho and runs into a mirror, completely shattering it into pieces. When Groucho runs to confront the commotion, Harpo realises they are both dressed in identical nightgowns. He mimics him, pretending he is his reflection, and the two become locked in an absurdist dance of mimicry. The double-booked Frost Children, opening for themselves, enact a similar dance of absurdism, in a time where we are confronted by virtual models of real life that have become sophisticated enough to be dubbed ‘digital twins’—in-silico replicas of their real-world counterparts, capable of modelling the behaviour of the weather, climate disasters, a human heart, or the next YouTube video we’ll scroll to.

Today, through augmented and virtual reality, metaversal technology, and AI, new layers of reality are added, and existing things appear along with digital twins. So close in simulation that the space between the body and its digital replica almost fully collapses. Benjamin Bratton, speaking at DigitalFUTURES in 2022, likened the digital twin’s predictive qualities to ‘shadow play’, or the phenomenon where the shadow of a user switches place with the person. It’s the ever-familiar motif in a cartoon, perhaps most notably Peter Pan, where a character’s shadow starts acting on its own and is chased around a room, or even folded into a suitcase.

 But ‘digital twins’ is merely a label applied to technology that has been built for decades, intended to commoditise it, write Forbes articles about it, and co-opt it into capital. It’s a kind of autonomic spoofing, to borrow another phrase from Bratton, of our reality—an attempt to mirror the person beneath it. Frost Children’s double bill of themselves, their own shadow play, creates a spoof not just of themselves, but of the kinds of double-headed twinning technocrats attempt to repackage and sell back to us today. What could be a more fitting way to shatter the power of this veiling than for your digital twin to be yourselves? Especially as multi-instrumentalists able to outperform and outpace their co-opting. “We’re able to make so many types of beats and song structures and whatever, it’s like, well, that’s the other band that should open for us. You know? Because the two albums… they’re also two bands”, Angel smiles, “sort of”.

When I encountered this dualism in Bristol’s Lexington venue, the siblings created a transition period, an interval between the frenetic Speed Run and the honeyed Hearth Room. “You have now seen Frost Children”, Angel announced. Her voice rising above Lulu’s swelling chords, “it’s now time for Frost Children”. Live, drenched with sweat, Angel’s announcement creates a kind of double take, even if we’ve all been expecting it. Are Frost Children here now? Who was here before?

A double take is embodied, it shocks us, it reminds us that memory is tactile, built from sensation. The interval becomes a chasm and Frost Children become mythical Grenzgängers—beings that watch over thresholds or borders, between one world and another.

This stylistic shift undercuts audience expectations in a moment where the space between fans and artists has reached a new level of compression. Where the desire to understand and control an artist is fervent, palpable, and complex. 

If other artists can learn anything from Frost Children, it’s that keeping an audience on their toes isn’t just exciting, it’s endearing. It speaks to a deep understanding of post-internet cultural dynamics. “I do like fooling people”, Angel admits. “We had body doubles appear as us at a Q&A about a documentary for Hearth Room. It took place at this theatre in New York, but we were in Japan at the time. So, we had these two lookalikes brought to the Q&A, which was all about authenticity. It was literally a lookalike of me saying, ‘It’s all about, like, being yourself’”. 

In so much of digital life today, we know we’re being fooled, but we adore the two-dimensional falseness of it. Frost Children bring their fans into the joke; they create a space for reflection. As Angel pleads at the close of the cotton-wool-wrapped ‘Marigold’, “Tell me lies, tell me lies, I believe you”. Right now, maybe knowingly being fooled is a more authentic relationship with the world. We want to dwell in make-believe. We are fools, of course we are. Everyone is.

“I think it’s funny to paint this picture of an entire upheaval of your taste. To produce a whole other product within a couple of months”, Angel continues, on the subject of denouncing previous work. “I think it’s similar to what watching a speed run of a video game is like”. On first listen, Speed Run appeared to be a portrait of speedrunning—the increasingly popular subculture of gamers completing a game as quickly as possible, complete with competitive leaderboards, livestreaming events, and an entire history of techniques, broken records and groups of fans acting as regulatory boards. Speed Run took this niche subculture and distilled it into an album that blended the real and the virtual. It synthesised our habituation to virtual space. Spots in New York and visits to Europe were indistinguishable from dungeons, rayguns, portal glitches and hyperdrive turbo trick shots. 

But, with the speed of their pivot to Hearth Room, and the uncanniness of doubling through their tour dates, the act of speedrunning is more obviously a process that undergirds their output and approach to genre, art, and creation. “That’s very true”, Lulu agrees when I put this to the pair. “We never sit still. I think we have this unspoken rule between the two of us that we can’t sit with anything for longer than nine months”. Rather than simply creating a gamified album, their approach to speed advises something even more absurdist: gamify your career.

In TWIST 003, we proposed speedrunning as a kind of post-parkour performance art, where gamers pursue spatial mastery over modern digital sludge. But Frost Children push this notion to a different stratosphere. Beyond a simple hypothesis of the pair as post-parkour practitioners, their on-stage puppetry and demolition of the album cycle enact something we could call ‘core parkour’—the free movement and destruction of mechanisms that separate and control taste. On the topic of their momentum, Angel prompts Lulu to tell an anecdote. “I was in this shitty Williamsburg apartment when I moved to New York”, Lulu obliges. “There was this guy installing an AC unit, and he came on a bike. I gave him cash, and he was like, ‘I’m off to the next installation.’ I was like, ‘Damn, do you just bike everywhere?’ and he’s like, ‘If you stop moving... you’ll get sick’”. Lulu laughs, “ever since then, I haven’t stopped moving”. In the years since, the pair have traversed the mechanics of the internet, blending digital space and TikTok algorithms with real-life NPCs. They scale football shirts, Y2K, dubstep, and countless other aesthetics in a technique defined by a fine-tuned performance art of speed.

Frost Children’s process also speaks to a new way of creating and making music more autonomously. It’s a classic story: artists run out of steam or turn their backs on their own creations. They’re forced to sit on work for too long due to the restrictions of large labels. Increasingly, artists are releasing independently or signing with indie labels that allow them to create their own rules, releasing bootlegs, remixes, mixtapes, and full-length projects that keep niche groups of fans hooked. “We’re really blessed that we’re in a place where we can, if we want to, make a single in this room right now and text it to the team and be like, let’s have this drop tomorrow”, Lulu tells us.

Speedrunners analyse the mechanics of a game and enact a process of ‘sequence breaking’, shattering the rules and regulations laid out by the developer. Frost Children and their peers enact a similar pursuit of freedom, wrestling control back into their hands—they push their artistic process to the limit, capturing our frenzied moment with acute precision. “You know, there’s a great quote, it comes from Bose speaker company”, Angel tells us, “It says: pause for nothing”.

The communal autonomy this breakneck speed creates is, at its very core, liberating. It displays an artistic process that prioritises joy over dull mechanics. But the dualism of warm and cold also enacts a kind of shadow play. Speed Run is the icier record, a quality Lulu silkily announces on the opening track, “fast asleep, I’m in a dream, I’m frozen”. The synths are jagged, pointed, stalactitic—they’re melting from the ceiling, poised to drop on a passerby’s head at any moment. And yet, when Frost Children break into any of the tracks from Speed Run in a live setting, a room reaches its boiling point, bodies flail against each other, the pandemic never happened. You might reach for your phone to capture the chaos in a carefully tailored story, with the right font for the tag of their Instagram account—but you’ll lose control of the device, lost in a crowd of other people losing themselves, their bodies rendered and calcified by hot sprints of CDJs being shredded.

The warmth of Hearth Room is intriguing by comparison. Like its namesake, it takes after a space to warm oneself, physically and spiritually. Lyrics are sweet and tender, from soothing mentions of sunlight to twee murmurings of doves, ducks and mallards. But they’re always underpinned by the siblings’ humour, a razor-sharp ability to see the world through the online. The animals are ‘playing telephone’ and love is still experienced through the TikTok trend of microwaving oats in a mug. While the album has been praised for its genuine presence and warmth, perhaps there’s a deeper truth about the potentiality of warmth in communities, from live performance settings to online spaces. Shumon Basar, speaking to 032c in 2023, described the warmth of the online feed, the pleasure of accruing useless information, opinion and knowledge by being an extremely online person. As Basar describes, “love and desire are located in the feed, and the feed is fuelled by desire and love”.

For Frost Children, the warmth of the feed characterises their online auras, but it also leaks into nature. Into live contexts. Even the room in which we spoke to them.

“Everyone is in on the joke”, Angel describes. Maybe that’s the entire point. The language of the online mixes luxuriously into their status as artists and the people beneath. For the extremely online listener, Frost Children create odes to this indistinguishability. The warmth of being wrapped in a communal state of pointless knowing.