When Angel and Lulu Prost were kids in St. Louis, Missouri, they played in a family band at church on Sundays. Now the twin tricksters make music so aggro it could jumpscare the pope. Frost Children’s new album, SISTER, is packed with tracks that sound devised in a VO2 max lab to push people into excruciating physical exertion. This is a duo who grew up on brostep and Krewella and have spent their career shitting on taste boundaries: Their output to date has been consistently peculiar and amusingly all over the place, from a Super Smash Bros. theme rewired into hyperpop to “Bob Dylan,” a spoken-word composition that imagines the iconic songwriter encountering a Jack Harlow-branded Sweetgreen salad. SISTER cuts the shit and streamlines their sound into a fat hit of DJ dopamine. It’s their bid for stardom, with the exuberant euphoria dulled only by the sense that this has been done so many times over.
SISTER throws back to the era of Mad Decent Boat Parties and EDC livestreams on desktop YouTube. This is music for mammoth festival grounds, a post-ironic pastiche of the early 2010s. Frost Children dial the rickety rollercoaster of EDM pop to Kingda Ka chaos: ecstatic rises and drops of death. Some tracks need NSFW warnings, because they’ll make you wanna smash your desk: “Electric” summons an earth-shakingly thunderous bassline and “Control” throttles with the furor of a cyborg firing plasma beams out of its eyes/ The album reaches peak geek when they let the beats wig out. “Don’t make me cry” explodes like they’re keymashing the DAW. Highlight “Ralph Lauren” is one of the few sounds that feels genuinely new here, a chic circus of pop and squelch and sleazy synths. Babymorocco hops between frenetic claps and kicks like he’s limboing off nine drinks.
This kind of YOLO EDM-pop was always hyper-expressive and hyper-surface: It simulated the feeling of a love so powerful, a sensation so large, that nothing else mattered. Frost Children’s update to the party-pop template attempts to give it a genuine, tender core; they’re emo kids at heart and they embroider the ballistic drops with anxious reflections and half-hooks about crying for help. It’s a strange contrast—a cocktail of delirious fun and angsty distress. On “Bound2U,” Angel and Lulu snarl at a lover they can’t quit over a beat that sounds like an acoustic guitar exploded by synth TNT. Analog outlier “Sister” flashes back to when the duo was 17 and their relationship was on the fritz. Sometimes the delivery comes across unnecessarily abrasive, like an MC who can’t stop interrupting and monologues over the climax. Their production intoxicates most with the more careless pop anthems—“Radio” is so punchy you can almost smell Kim Petras’ fruity lipstick.
But even the most pleasant songs lack that one genius earworm that makes something like Zedd’s “Clarity” (or modern EDM peer Ninajirachi’s recent starburst of a song “All I Am”) so ebullient. “What Is Forever For” sounds whiny and way too predictable—all future bass-y synths and hooks that scream bittersweet, but in a way that makes you think of a TV ad targeting millennials wistful for their Chainsmokers years; you can see the crystal-shard shower of the drop coming from a mile away. “Blue Eyes” and “2 LØVE” coast on blissed-out vocal chops like something from the Majestic Casual archives. At times it feels like Frost Children are camouflaging their natural eclecticism: They could pull off something as unhinged as Skrillex’s “Cinema” remix, but SISTER is more straightforward, a glassy garden of echoing vox and dewy-eyed dreaminess.
The low ebbs detract from an album that’s otherwise difficult to resist bouncing to. SISTER adds to what has become, depending on your perspective, an EDM-pop renaissance or an exhausting clone swamp: the flood of electro-pyros like The Hellp, 2hollis, Ninajirachi, Bassvictim, Effie, and Suzy Sheer; a new generation of producers, like Underscores, whose brains were broken by Skrillex and Porter Robinson. Fans already invested in the Frost Children story may find they can project intention onto the duo’s personalized throwbacks. For the rest of us? There’s already so much of this stuff, and Frost Children have made some more.
