As a kid getting bullied, Chad Green "needed a 'theme song' to get me through the day". On Frozen Soul's killer new album No Place Of Warmth, he's funnelling life's pain and challenges into making some of his own, with a little help from My Chem and Machine Head...
On a sunny day in Oklahoma City, Chad Green is connecting with his inner WWE superstar. Body slams and folding steel chairs aren’t part of the average Frozen Soul show, but on a rare day off from tour, the Texan death metallers’ hulking frontman is enthusing to K! on how the ability to harness one’s larger-than-life persona is every bit as important on a grand stage as in the squared-circle.
From ‘undead’ icon The Undertaker to reptilian redneck ‘Stone Cold’ Steve Austin, plenty of childhood idols who could rep his band’s brand of ice cold ass-kicking. Instead, Chad points to the absurdist charm of a cult hero who just debuted at Wrestlemania: Detroit ghoul Danhausen.
“It all comes down to the love for what you do,” the vocalist smiles. “Danhausen has his gimmick and he rolls with it. It feels low-effort, but not in a negative way. It’s the same way when someone is great at their instrument. They make it look easy. I think the same thing applies to bands.
“Our gimmick might just seem like ‘cold stuff’ but it’s also about depression and the cold reality of life. Even if our sound isn’t someone’s thing, they can get the vibe. That can be the key to longevity in so many forms of entertainment, something you can show to somebody even 20 or 30 years into your career and have them say ‘This is cool!’
“Oh, and there even was an old wrestler called ‘Glacier’ – WCW’s ‘frosty phenom’ – who came out wielding a snow machine. But I didn’t know about him until maybe three years into Frozen Soul!”
Currently on tour with carnivalesque Swedes Avatar, putting on a show has been pivotal to Frozen Soul winning over unsuspecting new fans. Having already toured with death metal luminaries like Cannibal Corpse and Napalm Death, they could’ve embedded themselves in a nasty niche. But that’s just not how Frozen Soul roll.
“As time moves on, it’s about how to keep things fresh and interesting,” Chad explains. “How does this become something we can do til we’re 70 years old? How do we make it last? I think the answer to that is to take cool tours with artists people wouldn’t expect. As I’ve focused on being more crowd-centred, with a ‘pro wrestler mentality’, we’ve gotten maybe our best reactions ever!”
Third album No Place Of Warmth is an extension of that mindset on record. Where 2021’s Crypt Of Ice and 2023’s Glacial Domination were the sounds of a band trying to tap into the icy heart of their own death metal obsessions, this is an album more fixated on kicking ass and having fun.
“When I first got into death metal, I was just a little fat kid being bullied and I needed my ‘theme song’ get me through the day,” Chad reflects. “So that’s what I want when I write for Frozen Soul...”
Heading to Midland, Michigan with producer Josh Schroeder, Chad and bandmates Samantha Mobley (bass), Matt Dennard (drums), Michael Munday and Chris Bonner (guitar) had little idea of how the finished album would be. Somehow, the town felt custom-built to open their minds. Not just home to Josh’s cutting-edge Random Awesome studio, Midland is also the headquarters for The Dow Chemical Company and a trippy kind of elemental magic flowed through the place.
“That town is fuckin’ freaky, man,” Chad laughs. “It’s like this futuristic, dystopian blip in space and time. Dow Chemical was the primary manufacturer of napalm and Agent Orange for the United States. The old people there are dying off and their kids are finding, like, barrels of napalm in their basements. But the company fucked so may people over that they pumped millions into the city, too. As soon as you’re inside the city limits, the trees are all so green. There are flowers on the side of every road. There’s fruit and vegetables growing everywhere – even outside the grocery store! There was a peach tree outside the house where we recorded that we could’ve eaten the fruit off!
“There’s also this weird cryptid story about things called Melon Heads which live underground and sneak into your house. I found that out one day while taking a shower. I picked up my bar of soap there was a straight-up, big-ass cartoon bite out of it. We’d been leaving our doors unlocked. Safe to say, we didn’t after that. But those experiences all fed our sense of purpose and exploration going into the studio. Which was good, because we’d really never been so unprepared before!”
The desire to mix things up can be seen straight from the use of the word ‘warmth’ in the album title. Really, though, that name is more about the need to embrace cold reality without crumbling.
“It started out called ‘No Place For Warmth’ in an aggressive sense,” Chad digs in. “But as we began to shift towards heaviness in emotional terms, it became ‘No Place Of Warmth’. In the beginning, I got too in my head: ‘This song is about Predator. This song is about Warhammer 40K. This song is about Hellraiser.’
“But then I got into walking around Midland, covering 10 miles every day just listening to the songs. I started getting in my feels. I started thinking about life over the past 10 years. All the friends and family we lost, and how if I’m stuck in the cold, I’m going to own it.”
Sadly, there has been no shortage of trauma on which to draw. Having lost his younger brother Cory in the lead up to Glacial Domination, and found some catharsis in the song Arsenal Of War – based on the old game EverQuest they used to play together – music was a positive tool to process. But being away on tour when his grandfather passed a year later was tough to take.
Then Chris’ mom died, and Michael’s girlfriend’s dad, for whom the six-stringer had been helping to care. That’s not to even mention the catalogue of close friends and colleagues gone away, most recently synthwave hero GosT, with whom Chad went way back in the Texas hardcore scene.
“It builds up,” Chad sighs, “and you need to release it. After Arsenal Of War I realised that there are so many people in the metal, punk and hardcore community who don’t feel like they can talk about their feelings, who have no way to let out that anger in a constructive way. Since I started speaking about mental health, I’ve gotten so many messages. Some of those are so dark I could never repeat them. But it’s good that people are talking.
“This is the only place I feel at home. My family wasn’t well off. I had a rough childhood. I needed this stuff. And when I found it I latched on. When people understand the things you’re talking about, when they really feel them, you feel like a family.”
Mournfulness and misery are not on the menu, mind. Instead, they process the darkness within through untamed ice-fire and fury. A singular, cohesive body of work, Chad shares that it was almost impossible to pick out which songs would serve as singles, and that they eventually went with the likes of DEATHWEAVER primarily because of how they’d fit with music video adaptation.
Also, they wanted to highlight the range of awesome guest slots they’d managed to pack in with My Chemical Romance frontman Gerard Way adding high drama to the title-track, Machine Head master Robb Flynn on Invoke War and Sanguisugabogg’s Devin Swank powering Dreadnought.
“We’d met Gerard a couple of times and talked a bunch about synthwave and things like that. As we were figuring out the title-track, it felt so epic-sounding and we thought it would be funny to ask Gerard if he wanted to be on there, because there was no way he would agree. But he texted back within 30 seconds: ‘Yes!’ He went above and beyond. He even did it right before the MCR stadium tour in South America this year. I think he hurt his throat doing a style of heavy vocals he never had before. And he didn’t charge us anything. He’s just a cool dude down to do cool stuff.
“Beyond that, I’ve ripped many Machine Head riffs off in my day. We’ve known [MH bassist] Jared [MacEachern] for a while and we ended up hanging out with him and Robb when we were on tour with Killswitch Engage. When Robb and I got to talking about Invoke War on the phone, it turned out we had a lot of similarities in loss. His mom and my brother went through similar things. I was blown away by the lyrics he wrote, and how he wanted to be in the video, holding up those rosary beads, in remembrance.
“Devin is easily our oldest friend of the three. So when we hit him up he just did his part. We wanted a video for Dreadnought, but he wasn’t available and we didn’t want to do it without him.”
Loyalty to old friends is high on Frozen Soul’s list of priorities. Riding the new wave of American death metal a few years ago alongside the ‘Bogg, Gatecreeper, 200 Stab Wounds and Undeath, it felt like Frozen Soul were part of an elite gang. It’s less tight-knit, now, but still ruling heavy music.
“When we were all coming up, we were all pushing each other,” Chad shrugs. “It was one big party. United. Now we fight battles by ourselves and it’s that bit harder. As we found success, politics and managers and agents got involved. When that happens, it’s not as easy to tour together any more. Everybody is trying to do their thing, push forward, and have sustainability.
“Do I think it would be cool to have a Big Four of the New Wave Of Death Metal tour? Absolutely. Do I think that would ever happen now it’s outside the actual bands’ control? Probably not. But we’re all absolutely still friends. And we sure proved the naysayers wrong who said this death metal wave wouldn’t last!”
For now, it’s just about making the most of the time they have. As our chat comes to a close, Chad is getting ready to hang out with his girlfriend and eight year old son who surprised him on his day off. The kid just scored a 1988 ...And Justice For All CD in a local record store and experienced his first real pit last night at Avatar. Above all, there’s the sense that Frozen Soul is geared towards giving back to that new generation of metalhead in a way that’s hellacious and healthy.
“As much time as you spend loving music and loving bands, you need to take time to love yourself,” the frontman signs off. “You can love music, but it should be background music to get stuff done and feel good about it. That is what we want from the future of this band. We don’t want to worry about crazy song structures or how we can be ‘the most death metal band’. We just want to have fun.
“We’ve already transcended pinning ourselves to any one thing. Now we want to incorporate all the things that we love into what we do. And if you don’t like that? Well, go and kick rocks...”
No Place Of Warmth is released on May 8 via Century Media.
Read this next:
