Frost Children on Bathhouses, Bodega Coffee, and “Baby Mindset”

Despite what you’ve heard, Angel and Lulu Prost, better known as Frost Children, know how to have fun. The New York-based sibling duo—they live in Queens, not the Lower East Side—hail from St. Louis and make the kind of music your parents might not understand. Their second album, SPEED RUN, hones in on a genre-bending sound that’s provoked comparison to the musical acts of yesteryear—think Cobra Starships meets The Millionaires—and has pushed skeptic critics to over-simplify their music as part of the early aughts dance-pop revivalist movement with heavy roots in New York City’s downtown scene. “I love seeing that it spawned a lot of discourse,” says Angel. “I feel like that’s always a really good sign.” Although the siblings don’t care too much about the negative feedback, they stay reading the comments. “I’m never like, what do you know?” adds Lulu. “It’s always just like, that’s fair. That’s your opinion, I guess.” The day after their new album got a sassy Pitchfork review, and a few days before the siblings embark on a tour with Yves Tumor, Interview spent a day off with Angel and Lulu, gallivanting to their favorite downtown spots, from the Russian baths to the SeaGlass carousel in Battery Park.

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QUEENS (HOME)

MACIAS: Are y’all roommates or you only work together?

LULU: Yeah. We live together, too. We live in Queens, New York.

ANGEL: In a neighborhood near it.

MACIAS: Where do you hang out most?

ANGEL: Near Bushwick. But I won’t say which streets.

LULU: I mean, a lot of our friends work in Bushwick. Our friend Christian works at a coffee shop that I like to visit a lot. I go to Maria Hernandez, I always run into it. That’s kind of where everyone lives and where a lot of the stuff to do is.

LULU: Last time I was at Maria Hernandez, I caught Sweet Joey Vermouth in the act, making bug art.

ANGEL: Oh, really?

LULU: Yeah.

ANGEL: Do you know him? He’s this guy we know that’s pretty big on TikTok. He does art and he also makes music, but he does these bug art things where he’ll get a coloring book of bugs, then color it in a crazy way, then put a bunch of stickers on it, then laminate it, and then process it. He’ll just keep adding layers to this thing and then he makes these, I don’t know, crazy TikToks. Sweet Joey Vermouth. He’s a crazy guy.

MACIAS: Where are you from originally?

ANGEL: We grew up in St. Louis. I’ve been here for six, seven years.

LULU: I’ve been here for two years. I’m a baby.

ANGEL: Yeah. I’m still a baby too, though. I told someone recently that I’ve been here for six or seven years. They’re like, “Oh, so you’re still a baby?” And I was like, “Mm-hmm.”

MACIAS: When does one stop being a New York baby? I’ve been told 10 years.

LULU: That makes sense but honestly, I feel it’s about baby mindset.

MACIAS: What’s baby mindset?

LULU: It’s the childlike zen mindset. Beginner’s mind. Live like a tourist in your own city.

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SEAGLASS CAROUSEL

LULU: We haven’t had a day where we’ve really set aside a full day of joy in a while. So I think this is kind of a fantasy day where we start off in the carousel. This carousel is made up of these giant bioluminescent fish and there’s this really beautiful orchestra soundtrack out of these low quality speakers.

ANGEL: That’s beautiful. They clap at the end of it.

LULU: Because you did great.

MACIAS: How many times have y’all been here before?

ANGEL: That’s probably our third or fourth time here.

MACIAS: Why do you like coming here?

ANGEL: Lulu and I love amusement parks. We used to go to this one in St. Louis all the time. I don’t know.  I can’t explain it, but the first time I heard it [the soundtrack to the carousel], I was crying. It’s just a beautiful place.

MACIAS: Why do you like coming here?

LULU: I mean, I’m a big SpongeBob head and this reminds me of coral reef, like I’m living in a Diet Dr. Kelp kind of world.

ANGEL: I mean, we grew up in a landlocked place, so we didn’t really have a beach story or like…

LULU: I mean, we love the aquarium. It was the only part of the zoo that I really vibed with.

ANGEL: I think maybe we just came to go to the Statue of Liberty. We rode one in Paris recently with our parents by the Sacré Coeur, and they love carousels in Paris. So decadent and glamorous. We just decided to ride it, spur of the moment. Huge memory, like one of the best memories I have.

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(CLOSED) PEARL DINER

LULU: Diners are the best.

ANGEL: We probably went to 20 diners on tour. Pretty much every meal.

MACIAS: What’s your diner order?

ANGEL: We both usually get veggie omelets. I was starting to really get into eggs benedict with no meat. I love a poached egg. Diners are just the best. We went to this diner in Nevada where they had trivia and we answered the trivia right. They didn’t charge us for the coffee.

MACIAS: That’s amazing.

ANGEL: I don’t know if they were related.

MACIAS: Just the coffee?

ANGEL: That was the only thing we got that morning but-

MACIAS: What’s your favorite thing about a diner?

LULU: The coffee?

ANGEL: Yeah, unlimited coffee. Nothing gets you jazzed like free diner coffee. It’s something that my brother would disagree with me heavily on. He’s a big coffee head.

MACIAS: Do you drink coffee every day or?

ANGEL: Yeah. I get it from my local Bodega.

MACIAS: Black?

ANGEL: It’s black. Yeah, I have an air, I have an espresso machine., but I love waking up, walking there, and seeing their faces. They have a cat named Luna.

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WALL STREET BATH & SPA 88

LULU: This is an amazing spa that we had some meetings at once when we were doing this Red Bull culture clash thing with Club Cringe. So we have some good memories here and it’s also an awesome spot to sweat out all your problems.

ANGEL: The staff here says, “This is where the supermodels come to fry off all their dead skin”.

MACIAS: How long do you hang out here for?

ANGEL: I mean, we’ve only been there a couple times, but it seems like an hour I would say. You can order Borscht in here and stuff. This is so New York.

MACIAS: Your life has changed radically over the past year. Beyond the carousel and the Russian baths, how else do you unplug?

LULU: Well, actually, today was the first time that we got recognized upon walking out of our apartment. On our street.

MACIAS: What was that like?

LULU: It was like really quick.

ANGEL: Lulu and I are really good at communicating with each other, I think with music and just personal stuff and we’re both very patient people too, so it works well.

MACIAS: What are your signs?

LULU: Both Pisces.

MACIAS: Now that this second album cycle is ending, what’s next?

LULU: Little bit of everything. We’re kind of just mainly relaxing and gearing up for the next tour. There’s offers, kind of like, “Which one should we do or should we wait and do another kind of headline thing?”

MACIAS: Who would be your dream tour mate?

ANGEL: On a tour with Björk, for sure.

LULU: Like it’s Björk or nobody.

ANGEL: Yeah, I think it’d be cool to do a little tour with an old rock band too, like Pavement or something. Maybe I’ll stick around for the pool, honestly.

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X PIZZA

ANGEL: They found one of my published pieces, because I write a lot in my free time for fun. I had written this thing called “Like it or not, I’m dropping a huge bomb of joy on your heart”. It got published in this online thing called Do Not Research. They found me through that and they asked me if I wanted to organize a reading. It’s a pizza shop that has CDJs.

MACIAS: Wow.

ANGEL: It is pretty cool, but I didn’t know how to organize a reading. I do know how to organize a show. So I got a bunch of friends and the whole concept of the show was “the great slow-downing.” It was a night of sub-100 BPM music and I had a metronome. If anyone went above a hundred beats per minute, I told them to slow it down. It’s such a small place that we didn’t even promote the show at all because there’s no room for a crowd. So then, I pitched a radio residency and now I’m doing that. It’s the opposite. It’s called Speedening Radio and it’s four weeks of progressively faster music.

MACIAS: And what week are you on now?

ANGEL: This is week three out of four. Today, I titled the show Mental Gymnastics, which is 150 bpm plus or minus 10.

MACIAS: That’s really fast, no?

ANGEL: It’s really fast for me. Lulu and I have been attracted to what we call the golden BPM recently, which is 128.

LULU: 128 really feels like the physical danceable golden number.

MACIAS: I once read somewhere that the first thing you should do in the morning is put on the song that makes you feel the happiest. Allegedly, it’s a good way to avoid having bad days.

ANGEL: I hear a lot of stuff about that specifically, like how to start your day in the most non-toxic way. Anyway, this week our friend Jake, aka DJ Trick, is doing 150 plus or minus 10. Next week, I don’t know, it’ll be whoever, whoever makes the fastest music I can think of.