Frost*

Frost* was formed in 2004 by keyboard player and singer Jem Godfrey, Released in 2006 the band's debut album "Milliontown" was an instant success and is regarded by many as a classic in the modern prog rock genre featuring John Mitchell on guitar, John Jowitt on bass and Andy Edwards on drums. The band quickly followed it up with "Experiments In Mass Appeal" in 2008, in many ways the antithesis of "Milliontown" featuring a much more stripped back sound, more concise songs and a new band member and singer in the form of Dec Burke. Divisive at the time, the album nonetheless received a lot of airplay on the college rock stations in the United States and helped the band become noticed by bands like Dream Theater who subsequently offered Frost* a UK support tour. The live album "The Philadelphia Experiment" followed in 2009 and the a long gap followed before 3rd album "Falling Satellites" was released in 2016 with a new line-up of Nathan King on bass and Craig Blundell on drums, plus returning guitarist and singer John Mitchell on guitar who also co-wrote much of the album with Jem Godfrey. Following the departure of drummer Blundell in 2019, the band elected to carry on as a 3 piece, "We were quite energised by the change to be honest", says Godfrey, "it gave us a much broader palette of options in compositional terms, we would write a song and say, "Let's imagine drummer x has joined the band, what would he do here? It led us off in some interesting new directions". In the end, three drummers became part of the recording project : Kaz Rodriguez (Chaka Khan, Josh Groban), Darby Todd (The Darkness, Martin Barre) and Pat Mastelotto (Mister Mister, King Crimson). "Each musician brought a very different style of playing to the music," says John Mitchell, "and we tailored the songs to suit them. For instance the songs "Skywards" and "Repeat To Fade" really needed a mighty backbeat and there's none finer than Pat Mastelloto on that front, he bought a cathedral full of power with him which we flipped out on when we put it all together. Pat's a complete legend so to work with him on a Frost* album was a huge honour". In September 2019 Godfrey and Mitchell rented a cottage for a week in Helford, Cornwall and set about converting it into a recording studio. Renaming it "Troubled Cow Studios", day one saw them write and record "Skywards" in complete demo form, "Island Life" was written on day two. On day three, the duo wrote what was to become the title and defining track of the new album, "Day And Age". The following January, the band setup a new temporary studio for a further week in a converted coastguard tower at Dungeness in East Sussex. "We were 30 feet by the sea, next to a nuclear power station and a lighthouse, in midwinter! So there was hardly any daylight and the weather was dreadful", laughs bassist Nathan King, "We wrote "Terrestrial" and "Repeat To Fade" there and in my head you can absolutely hear the bleak isolated oppression having an effect on us. The songs we wrote were far darker - the wind howling round the building at night, the power station generating crackles on the audio, a huge lighthouse next door sweeping a vast light into the fog every 30 seconds and John screaming "ENJOY YOURSELVES YOU SCUM" into a microphone. It was absolutely brilliant!". With 4th album "Day And Age" now in the bag and due for release in May 2021, Frost* are back in action once more.