Frost Children’s music is thrillingly unpolished, and while the hyperpop duo—siblings Angel and Lulu—are in their 20s, their songs boast an alluring adolescent snottiness. They’re nostalgic for a time when Nickelodeon, EDM festivals, MySpace, and Vice magazine somehow felt like part of the same culture, before social media completely took over, but they approach this romanticized notion of the recent past without irony. Their sixth studio album, Sister, feels surprisingly innocent, curious and excited by technology rather than dazed and numbed by it.
The album brings a rock sensibility to Frost Children’s brand of dance music, with harsh sawtooth synthesizers and an overall abrasive velocity. Like Justice and Skrillex, Angel and Lulu find joy in making noise you can dance to. And their skill as songwriters has developed since 2023’s more guitar-driven Hearth Room, working hooks and melodic passages around heavily distorted chords and EDM drops. “2 Løve” is a marvel of sound design, looping several versions of the title phrase on top of one another, creating rhythm and dynamics out of little more than dozens of pitch-shifted overdubs and crashing percussion.
The euphoric opening track, “Position Famous,” lays out what could be seen as the manifesto for Frost Children’s increased ambitions: “Put me in your place/I’ll take it way to the top…I make it look so easy to live/And I got 1, 2, 3, 4 reason to flip.” Other songs on Sister share the same attitude, as though Angel and Lulu know they’ve got something to prove. On the rave-y “Electric,” they describe themselves as “the new sound coming to save you.”
Sister also serves as a heartfelt tribute to the bond between Angel and Lulu. “Turn around and face me, sister,” they sing together on the title track. Unfortunately, when juxtaposed with the album’s more hard-hitting tracks, the slower, more emotional moments feel less impactful. Frost Children are at their best when their songs are hedonistic, even if those songs tend to sound similar in tone and tempo. Still, Sister is the best synthesis of the duo’s influences—from emo and pop-punk to “indie sleaze”—to date, and they demonstrate the chops to back up their belief in their own excellence.
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