Crystal laughter
Crimson flower
In a chariot of silver
Your DNA
Locked out!
Imagine a Reagan-era hacker flick that never got past the censors: War Games’ David Lightman and Tron’s Kevin Flynn leading a team infiltrating a miltary command bunker, Peter Murphy at the terminal, Chris & Cosey patching into the security system, Cabaret Voltaire flooding the mainframe with false instructions, and Snowy Red calmly negotiating with the AI, while Kraftwerk guards the elevator in matching shirts while the red phone begins to ring. That is the nasty little pleasure of Locked Out, the new transmission from San Francisco’s Frozen Warnings.
Frozen Warnings are Walker Phillips and Caira Paravel, sharing vocals and production as if they were trying to hotwire a dead satellite with a drum machine, a cold bass line, and a chant. Their manifesto reads like the operating protocol for the whole enterprise: “We have no history that is meaningful, we only look forward and abandon hope with total optimism. Dance is the eternal now, in dance we destroy our past and our future.” Here, forward motion becomes an act of erasure, and the dance floor is where the evidence disappears.
This is minimal/punk/industrial music with the temperature turned down until your teeth hurt. The beat moves through fluorescent confusion while clipped commands, failed passwords, and flashes of “crystal laughter” and “crimson flower” slip across the screen. Locked Out has its own cheap-thrill panic, a Cold War synth track thawed for our twenty-first-century security state, where every password fails and every screen gives you the same blank stare.
The song’s origin story is almost too perfect, which means it belongs to the record rather than the press sheet. “Locked Out was written spontaneously during rehearsal when the studio computer locked itself, Caira began chanting ‘locked out!’ and I joined in, sampling my voice as the arrhythmic loop that forms the song’s core texture. The rest was improvised quickly to keep the spirit. On the Locked Out Remixes EP, we explored more deliberate remix arrangements.”
You can hear that accident breathing through the track. The vocal loop stumbles and snaps, more malfunction than metronome. Paravel and Phillips keep the arrangement lean, with enough space for each clang and clipped phrase to feel like it has been stamped onto magnetic tape by a government machine with a hangover. Nothing feels polished into civility. The track grins with aluminum teeth, bored with good manners, alive with bad electricity.
The video doubles down on the damaged broadcast. Fred Joseph’s VHS-style montage is all static, screen glare, smear, and visual debris, like fragments from a dream recorded over an instructional tape from 1984.
“The video was heavily processed by director Fred Joseph with vintage equipment, filming off of screens and that kind of thing,” says the band. “It was shot very spur of the moment, mirroring the approach we took to recording the song—basically, using old technology and letting chance take over.”
Watch the video for Locked Out below:
Locked Out turns a computer failure into a feverish little alarm, the kind of track that makes paranoia useful, makes repetition rude, and makes the machine sound gloriously sick of being a machine.
Listen to the Locked Out Remixes EP below:
Locked Out is featured on Frozen Warnings’ latest album, Momentum. Order the album here.
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