Interview:	FROZEN CROWN
Title:	Power✓ Speed✓ Melody✓ Precision✓

With their fifth album „War Hearts“, this Italian epitome of melodic, gripping Power Metal joy symbolically breaks their own sound barrier!

Drivingly energetic, breathtakingly hyper-whirling, captivatingly nimble and at the same time structurally pleasingly coherent as well as remarkably precise in their almost intoxicating flow of playing, Frozen Crown are convincing all along the line.

With the new, just 18-year-old guitarist Alessia Lanzone, who took part in the recordings as well as writing her own solos, the signs for the six-piece from Lombardy are all set to take off!

Singer Giada "Jade" Etro and guitarist Federico Mondelli are happy to talk about the new work.

Congratulations for including adorable Alessia in the line-up! How did you get together and what can you tell about the first personal meeting with her? She must have impressed you guys a lot… 


Jade: Thanks a lot! We also love Alessia and her arrival definitely brought a ton of positive energy in the band, as well as a breeze of youthfulness - not that we were lacking in that department. [laughs] She lives literally 5 minutes close to me and Federico, and she's always been a Frozen Crown fan, so we've been in touch at least since 2020 - she was literally a kid back then. We didn't actually search for her, she's always been there, so to speak, and when the time came, we just jumped at her place and asked her to join the band - she was barely 17 back then. There was no audition for our 3rd guitar player, we just wanted HER! From our 2nd album on we started including several layers of guitars in the studio, which were pretty much impossible to reproduce live in their entirety - if not with a heavy use of backing tracks. We've always been against abusing tape live and we always wanted to sound as rough and live as possible, so we always cherished the idea of having three guitar players, to have that rhythm guitar always going during dual guitar leads. With our 4th album "Call Of The North" we just found our ideal studio sound, and during our first promotional tour of that album we realized we weren't just able to recreate that live. We added Alessia so Frozen Crown could sound live how it was meant to be!

To what extent has Alessia already been involved in the songwriting for "War Hearts"? 


Federico: Of course she wrote and recorded all her solos! It was awesome and very interesting to work with her in the studio. She was basically a total newbie for what concerns studio recordings, but it worked really naturally for her. She had pre-written some of the solos, but when she plugged her guitar and started recordings, she pretty much re-wrote everything from scratch and recorded most parts on the fly. Some of her musical ideas and her approach in general also were inspirational for me and led me to re-write some guitar parts I had already recorded. It was literally a breeze to work with her, and very refreshing.

The new material is lively as hell, often ecstatically fast-paced and beautifully precise ... with which moods and visions did you approach the current songwriting? 


Jade: It's fast-paced cause we're afraid of time passing by! Everything we do is a "Battle Against Time", to mention Wintersun. Seriously, we are obsessed by the "seize the day" philosophy and I could say that's one of the recurring "visions" with which we approached the "War Hearts" songwriting. There's even a song, "Edge Of Reality", totally inspired to "Highlander", a movie where the concept of feeling powerless in front of the inevitable passing of time is pretty much the main topic. Aside from that, I would say we are fans of lots of such works, from the sword and sorcery of Robert E. Howard and Frank Frazetta, of which Federico is a big fan of, to the ever classic Tolkien and George R. R. Martin, whose works I'm an avid reader myself. 


Federico: Jade is a huge fan of the "Game Of Thrones" Saga, and we've always been associated with it from the very beginning, probably cause when the band came out the show was still very popular, and we were singing about winter and battles in the snow with a blonde female singer. Very few people know I always hated this association, cause I couldn't stand the show. [laughs] Especially that fixation for cutting off people's limbs and to perpetually indulge in describing or showing mutilation... just not my thing. But thanks R. R. Martin for contributing to our popularity somehow. [laughs]

How do you see and evaluate the new album on the new label within your musical journey so far?

Jade: It was just the natural choice. We'll always be grateful to Scarlet Records for the years we spent together, but moving to Napalm Records was a necessary step. The new album is at the same time the final Frozen Crown evolution, and a new beginning. We like to refer to it as "the first episode of the Frozen Crown reboot", cause it has got all the elements that characterized the band during the years, but at the same time it's also the album I would advice to someone who never listened to Frozen Crown before. Our sound is easily recognizable from the first note, and it's also the most balanced and "newbie friendly" of all our albums. The fact we're releasing it with a new label - and with a strong label like Napalm - is just another sign of this actually being our "year zero".

How can the readers imagine Frozen Crown writing, developing and finalizing one of their (new) songs? 


Jade: Federico is always the one who writes most of the material, if not all of it. He starts with some vocal ideas, pretty much always a verse and a chorus, with a basic layer of chords, plus maybe one main riff. That's it. I mean, 90 % of the song is done, cause for us vocal melodies are the most important thing, followed by the song main riff - which can be the intro most of the times, or the riff just before the verse. After that, I sing the melody he wrote in different tuning until we find the optimal one - tuning is a-l-w-a-y-s decided based on vocals, and on vocals only, while our drummer Niso takes care of the drum duties and of some arrangement here and there. Eventually, when the song is put together - so we also developed a bridge, a central part etc - and Federico has taken care of all guitars and keyboards, Ikki records his bass, and Sheena and Alessia record their guitar solos together with Federico. This is how a Frozen Crown song is finalized 100 % of the time.

Who out of you guys did the lion's share of the new song material?

Jade: As I said above, Federico, as usual. he's a very prolific writer and Frozen Crown are mostly his vision. I wrote some lyrics here and there, but he always wrote the vast majority of them, as well as taking care of all the album covers, band photos, videoclips etc. Frozen Crown was born as a solo project of him after all, and only later it became an actual band. I think "War Hearts" is the first album that portrays us as a proper band in the sense that all members actually contributed and recorded their own parts on the album.

How was the selection of songs for the upcoming album done - was it difficult or rather easy for the band? 


Federico: We didn't select any song because we wrote 9 tracks (plus the intro for track number 10), straight as they were meant to be, and already putting them in the current tracklist order from the get go. We're never writing multiple songs randomly and then see which one is fitting better with the others. We always write for the album, with the album concept always in mind, like it was a movie, so to speak. Before even having any song, we start with a rough idea of the whole album already, and then we identify the songs as chapters, and write down the main idea behind it. Only from that moment on we start the songwriting process. So there are no leftovers and no b-sides, this is exactly what we wrote for the album!

I can hear nuances and cross-references to good old Rhapsody, early Wintersun, technical Dragonforce in the new songs ... What are your favourite artists and bands in the line-up? 


Jade: I've always been a huge fan of Blind Guardian. They're my all time favorite band and I could consider them my main inspiration, especially if we talk about Power / Speed Metal, together maybe with some early Sonata Arctica and Nightwish. You mentioned Wintersun, and well, they are definitely one of Federico's main influences. But if I had to choose only one band I would say Children Of Bodom. They have been an inspiring band for all of us and also extremely important during our musical formation - and the album title and the big red clawed hands and the "red light in the eyes" of the monster on the front cover are just a few of the multiple references to them we used in our albums. 


Federico: Jade's absolutely right about Wintersun. I'd say many of our songs like "Neverending" (but also "Winterfall") paid great tribute to their style, especially to the legendary self titled album. X Japan, together with early Angra and Sonata Arctica are pretty much the only Power Metal I've ever listened to. My main inspiration comes both from Swedish Death Metal - In Flames and Dark Tranquillity above all - and from the Norwegian Black Metal scene: not only the forefathers Burzum, Satyricon and Immortal (my personal favorites) but also all the symphonic (Dimmu Borgir) and avantgarde scene (Arcturus, Covenant, Winds). Borknagar is probably the band I love the most and that I've eagerly been following album after album. Our song "Fire In The Sky" is totally worshipping them in some of the bridge parts, but the funny thing is everybody still keeps labeling us as "Power Metal". [laughs] Aside from Jade and me, Niso is really much into progressive Rock and Metal, how you could tell from some of his work on our longest songs, while our guitar players Sheena and Alessia are equally fans of relatively newer acts like Bullet For My Valentine, and of the older classics like Megadeth. Our bass player Ikki is at the same time the most eclectic and the most straightforward old school for what concerns musical tastes: he could name every single detail from the discography or the line-up of the most remote Thrash Metal band from the 80s, or from the last work of Vicky Psarakis after The Agonist.

Kudos - beside the great guitars - also for stick master Niso Tomasini - he plays fully accurate and organic, perfect fitting for the new material - he obviously has the perfect groove and feel for your style, doesn't he? 


Federico: He's perfect, absolutely. First of all, it's extremely important to point out that, while he's universally known for having joined the band in 2021 when we had that massive line-up change, he actually joined the band much earlier, in the Spring of 2020! So he's working with us till he was 17 years old (just like Alessia was when she joined the band), now he's 22 and we've been together like forever. He's absolutely a fundamental part of our sound, and Frozen Crown wouldn't sound the same without him. Let alone he's a total beast live and he steals all the attention while being a badass on stage AND playing perfectly as well. Niso is definitely the reason behind that "lively as hell" you wrote in the first question: he's just an explosion of enthusiasm, both in the studio and on the stage.

Is there and in case yes, what is the ONE song with the most meaning for you on "War Hearts" and why? 


Federico: It's "Ice Dragon", definitely. It was dedicated to a person - a brother as well as our biggest fan - that had been struggling with some demons for some time. The song itself was born after some dialogues we had together. It was meant to be a gift to him. Unfortunately he didn't live long enough to listen to the song, and this is all I have to say about it. Whenever we happen to play our first headlining show in Austria, we're playing that song on stage for him.

Please bring closer to the main lyrical content of your upcoming release! 


Jade: As usual, Frozen Crown lyrics are apparently talking about battles, frozen kingdoms, fire and steel, in a pretty “Game Of Thrones meets Conan the Barbarian” fashion. So there are no Elves, no Dwarves, no D&D stuff and such in our lyrics, but rather just plain Sword and Sorcery, raw and brutal, where there’s no such thing as real magic or supernatural events, but rather superstition (also inspired by the Medieval stories and fairytales from Italian tradition, coming from the Langobardic culture). However, through these colorful topics and characters, Frozen Crown deal with themes of self improvement, awareness and personal growth, and pretty much all the battles we talk about in our lyrics refer sometimes to inner struggles, sometimes to life difficulties. A couple of songs make reference (absolutely never in an explicit fashion) to some franchises and popular culture media: the already mentioned "Edge Of Reality", and "Bloodlines" which talks about vampires and make references to both the “Vampire: The Masquerade” series of board games and videogames, and the “Legacy Of Kain” series.

Are there any things, books, movies, etc. that can/have influenced you as musicians? 


Jade: The Silmarillion, even more than The Lord Of The Rings, is my favorite book ever. Speaking about movies, I'll be monotonous here, but the Peter Jackson trilogy of "The Lord Of The Rings" influenced me so much. I was very young when the first episode was out, and I remember I had been waiting for that movie for so long it had such a strong impact on me. The whole trilogy is amazing, and the soundtrack is one of the most epic ever.

Federico: I'd say every single book, movie, comic book I ever read or watch somehow influenced me as a musician. The ones that surface the most in Frozen Crown music are the gorgeous "Warcraft" related design and lore by Blizzard Entertainment, "Legacy Of Kain: Soul Reaver" and "MediEvil". All these games had an incredibly awesome soundtrack, but they also influenced my lyrics and the vision behind the songs. I'd say movie wise the Star Wars saga (the pre-Disney era) played a big part of this. The biggest influences, though, come from the world of Conan, both the books by Robert E. Howard and the unforgettable movie by John Milius. The latter also had a splendid soundtrack by Basil Poledouris, the main theme of which may probably be my favorite music ever created.

Six highly motivated personalities in one crew - sometimes a bit difficult to handle, or? 


Jade: ...or not! We're so much in harmony and there's such a perfect balance between all of us that every single person that meets us all together thinks we're a big family. And in some way, we are. We're really tied together and we all go along very well, there's no envy or jealousy between the band members and everything works like a breeze. It may seems hard (it seems hard to me too, considering I had several bands in the past and it's never easy to make many different personalities to go well together), but it's just as it is.


Federico: I'd say all Frozen Crown members are just nice and really positive minded people as much as they're skilled with their instruments - me excluded of course: I'm a horrible person and a bad musician. [laughs]

© Markus Eck, 17.09.2024

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