Inside Frost Children’s genre-flipping, crowd-surfing,…

Growing up as Zoomers in St Louis, Missouri, the Prosts’ first devoured music via the YouTube algorithm on their father’s desktop computer. Angel and Lulu then developed a passion for the emo songs they’d hear in the local mall, where they shopped at Hot Topic and, in Angel’s case, sneaked a first kiss at the cinema during an ​“edgelord” R‑rated flick. They listened to radio rock bands The Fray and Say Anything, the latter of whom Angel denotes ​“twee-mo icons.”

At Sunday mass, their father played piano and their mother violin. Angel took up the bass; Lulu got behind the drum kit. The pair played together in hodge-podge rock camp cover bands and covered Green Day songs with their eldest brother, Brian.

Eventually, they both moved to New York – Angel in 2016 to pursue a neuroscience degree, Lulu in 2021 after becoming disillusioned with music school in Nashville. Today they live near Ridgewood in Brooklyn, but mostly party in Bushwick. Angel cites a head injury she suffered at Irving Ave venue The End as one of the catalysts for Hearth Room​’s sound: while recovering, she only wanted to hear and make ​“lush, acoustic” music.

In a review of Speed Run, Pitchfork writer Sam Goldner described Frost Children’s hyperactive style-shifting as ​“gimmicky genre-mixing”. But the duo don’t care about criticism. ​“Before people pigeonhole us too much, I think we just wanted to nail it in people’s minds immediately that we’re not trying to be bogged down in one genre,” Angel says of the hard pivot between their two 2023 albums. And as Lulu, nursing a whiskey on the rocks, puts it, ​“There’s no time to waste.” They’re already working on a new album, which they promise will be another sharp left turn. ​“This one is gonna be the one that resets the clock on music,” Angel says. ​“The vibe shift.”