New York-based indie punk act Freezing Cold is a low-key supergroup of sorts. Drummer Angie Boylan has worked as the touring/session drummer in Sleater-Kinney, in addition to stints in Aye Nako and Cheeky. Guitarist and lead vocalist Jeff Cunningham was in the highly underrated Bridge & Tunnel and Ordinary Lives. Even one of the engineers of their newest album, Treasure Pool—out now on Don Giovanni Records—is Marissa Paternoste, lead vocalist and guitarist of Screaming Females.
Treasure Pool sees the band solidify into the new lineup of Cunningham, Boylan, and bassist Leanne Butkovic, who joined the band in 2019 shortly after the release of Freezing Cold’s debut album Glimmer. “Well, I would say I was my own hurdle,” says Bukovic about the process of slotting herself into a band that had already been playing together for two years. “I had played with Jeff and Angie in my old band before joining Freezing Cold, and thought that they were really cool people and obviously very talented musicians … They’re both very encouraging, very open, really encouraged me and pulled me out of my shell a little bit, if I was a little timid at first. So yeah, I would say I was the one that was making it more difficult than it maybe needed to be, because they were very open arms, like, ‘Come in let’s write songs; let’s play music together!’”
Unless you’ve somehow spent the last six years on Mars, you probably know what comes next in this story, as 2020 soon saw the band lose the ability to play shows during the global COVID-19 pandemic. “I had joined the band in 2019,” recalls Butkovic. “We were about to go embark on a long weekend of shows literally the week that everything was shut down. We were in our practice space being like, ‘Are these shows gonna happen? What’s going on?’ And then, one by one, they started getting canceled.”
Feeling a loss of momentum as they were just starting to get into the groove of the new lineup, the band turned their attention to writing new material remotely. In 2021 they released a two-song EP of the tracks “Stuck on Hold” and ”Drawn to Scale,” then began to work on another EP that would eventually grow into the aforementioned LP, Treasure Pool.
“And I was the one who was like, ‘Well, we just did an EP,’” says Butkovic. “From the start, I was like “I think we should do an album.” And then, the more and more we wrote, it became more and more apparent that, yeah, this is probably an album. So I feel very vindicated in my stance of yeah, this is an album.”
The slickly catchy record that they ultimately produced does work better as a full-length album, as Freezing Cold are adept at making one smart pop-rock song after another, crafting songs that catch your attention with both pop hooks and emotional depth. Treasure Pool is, indeed, an album, and we should all be happy about that.
Treasure Pool is out now and you can preorder it from Don Giovanni Records. Follow Freezing Cold on Instagram for future updates.
Photo Credit: August Stadnik
