Chad Green isn’t exactly sure how Frozen Soul have ended up here.

One minute, you’re hoping someone will like the riffs you’re writing; the next, you’re on the phone to Machine Head’s Robb Flynn, putting the world to rights. Heavy music is a magical thing that can transport you to far and mystical lands. It can also change your life right before your eyes.

And with the platform that Frozen Soul now have, they are making sure that the reason they started is still at the forefront of everything they do. That is having fun, and, despite its title, ‘No Place Of Warmth’ excels in keeping that sentiment in focus. Raw, unrelenting, and raucous, it’s an album that doesn’t hold back on its aggression, smashing classically damning death-metal battering rams with rollicking punk beats and gargles. It pays tribute to the past as much as it looks to the future, and is done with a love, respect and admiration for extreminity that cannot be bought.

To find out more about how such a record was created, Rock Sound sat down with Chad for a little catch-up.

Rock Sound: How are you feeling about where the band is right now and what you have been able to create with this new record?

Chad: It feels like it’s taken like 25 years for like 10 minutes, you know? We have talks because things have gone from just being a fun thing to a business thing. But even with all of that, it is always going to be about fun. Things get a little more stressful as production costs and touring increase. But we always look back to the old days because we were in bands long before this. Looking at playing to five people and being super stoked that even one person decided to walk across the pit, you know. Frozen Soul is very fortunate to have had support from the very beginning. But we have really been going nonstop, and we’ve still managed to write a badass record that we love. But overall, just looking at everything from the past and then looking at this now, we are actually fucking stoked and super happy.

What do you feel as though your initial intent with this specific record was, and how do you feel that changed as more and more of it came to life?

Chad: It was quite a crazy situation, because we totally weren’t ready to write a record. There’s some material on here that we have had since before [2020’s] ‘Crypt of Ice’. We really had to go through the riff bank that has been filling up over the years and dig to write this record. Even up until the moment we got through it, it wasn’t real for me. I was like, ‘There’s no way we could write a record right now. We’ve just been touring for three years straight, and like, haven’t even thought about writing music’. We were also trying a new producer, and we were so used to using our friend Daniel. He’s always just been a big part of the band in general. We took a risk by not working on this record with him, but we needed someone with extensive experience working under tight deadlines and with bands that don’t have much pre-written material. So we met Josh, and you know, he was super cool, and we got there, and, like, you know, our, our everything started changing as we started getting going. The two-and-a-half-week mark in the studio was when we locked in, and things started to get better.

It’s been a roller coaster over the last three years; we’ve just had so much stuff going on. I’m unfortunately the type of person who never really looks too far ahead, and maybe it’ll be my downfall one day. But I always try to live in the now and not worry too much about stuff outside of my control. I never looked far past our demo. I had the dream of playing shows, and that was it. With that in mind, this album was very much a, ‘Fuck, do we remember how to do this?’ Once it started connecting and we trimmed the fat, we found the sound we liked the most. We can still have our influences; we can still play the music we love, and we don’t have to sacrifice that in any way. We can do what we love and do what’s fun. We stopped thinking about anything else other than that.

A lot of that fun comes through even in the people that you have joining you on this record, in Gerard Way and Robb Flynn. How did both of those come about, and what did it mean to have their voices in the Frozen Soul mix?

Chad: It’s always more about doing something cool with your friends and something you’ll have a memory tied to, something you will look back on later in life and think is cool. We met Gerard a few years ago and were invited to My Chemical Romance’s big arena show in Dallas, where we met him and then exchanged numbers. He came to our LA show when we were on tour with Napalm Death. He’s just a great guy, and he likes really cool stuff, and we share a lot of common interests. So when we were trying to figure out who would be good for the song [‘No Place of Warmth’], it was more or less like I don’t think he would do this, but it would be cool. Why would he waste his time with this? And so, I just shot him a text and asked him, and he was all for it. He’s just down to do cool stuff. It’s the same with Robb in a sense. They’ve done so much, and they’ve inspired so many people. Robb, in particular, has inspired me since I was younger. Their Dynamo Fest video lives rent-free in my head all the time. They’re both just legendary frontmen.

Gerard is on another level. He’s the comic guy, he’s the movie guy, the show guy, the music guy, like he’s got a family. Doing cool stuff when you’ve pretty much done everything is sick, and he didn’t want anything for it. And Robb, we got on the phone and talked about the song, and we actually found out we had a lot of similar experiences in life. So it really resonated with him, and he wanted to be like a part of the song even more because of it. And he wrote his own lyrics, and I was just like, blown away, man. I was like in tears when I heard it. Rob Flynn actually cared enough to write lyrics in one of our songs. It’s not just a Frozen Soul song; now it’s his song, too.

And then there’s Devin [Swank] from Sanguisugabogg, where we came up at the same time. I always wanted him on a song, particular but like I, I guess, like, it didn’t really ever feel like we had anything heavy enough for him. If he’s going to talk shit on a song, we wanted it to be like a sledgehammer to the head. So we finally felt like we had it with this record, so I just texted him. He was like, “Let’s go, I’ll do it next week.”

Rock Sound: You mention that connection over life experience that you had with Robb, and it’s clear just how much more of yourself you’re putting into these songs. More different emotions than just creating something fantastical. What has it been like bringing more of that vulnerability in when it would be really easy to exist in a different world altogether?

Chad: I think it’s just like part of life. One of the cool things about movies and video games is the escape they offer. Having fun and cutting loose. But over time, something changes, and you realise that when you’re making those things, it has to have some meaning behind it. Over the last several years,  I’ve had a lot of really rough things happen in my life that have affected me a lot, mentally. Losing family and losing my friends, there’s a lot, and it makes you think about life. It makes you wonder what it must be like for everybody else, because I know how it feels for me every day, and I’m thinking, ‘What the fuck is going on? Who the fuck am I?’ Because these things happen, and they change who you are. I’m not who I was two years ago, and I’m definitely not the person I was when I was ten and such. It’s like you’re always trying to figure out what the best version of yourself is, and if that version of yourself is the best.

So, as we’ve progressed with Frozen Soul, certain things have happened where it’s become more of something that’s been at the forefront of my mind. Things I didn’t really know I needed to talk about. That I didn’t know people cared to hear. But it’s things that have always been in our music, and they’ve always been in any lyrics that I’ve written. Whether it’s themes of ice or themes of anger and/or despair, it’s all about battling something. It’s supposed to be cathartic.

And as things move on, I’m never content with doing the same thing over and over. Then some things have happened that forced me out of my shell to speak on some stuff within mental health, and it made a huge impact on my life in what I was confident in talking about. Then I started hearing so much from other people about how it impacted their lives and how they needed to hear it. Like, I was hearing horror stories from people’s lives. The real shit people don’t post about on the Internet, that you deal with when you’re staring off in the distance, figuring out what the fuck you’re still doing on this Earth. And with that, it just started coming out more and more.

Now it’s just like a part of what the entity behind this band was in the first place. This band was always about the cold reality of life, and it’s amazing how many people that idea has impacted.

RS: What does it truly mean to be in a position where this band has been able to achieve such a thing? That being completely yourself and open in a scene that so often is completely the opposite has paid off?

Chad: Whenever I get in my head about stuff, I’m just like, ‘Does anybody really care?’, but then I get constant messages and people coming up to me saying that they do, and that feels good. And we’re not some big band, or anything. We’re just normal people, and it’s fucking hard out there. But I never expected to be touring like we are, or out here making records like we are. So we are just going to ride it until the wheels fall off. The reality is that nobody really knows what the fuck they are doing. And it’s funny, because the Internet has fucked up so many things for so many people these days. You only see what everyone wants you to see. All those really planned moments, and not the ‘What the fuck is going on’ moment. It’s maybe why streaming is doing so well, because it’s real. It’s normal for people to allow themselves to be idiots once in a while, and it is probably really refreshing to see. And because of that, we are just going to continue to be happy to be here and show what that looks like. Because one day I won’t be able to.