FROZEN SOUL break down new album ‘No Place of Warmth’ track by track

“No Place of Warmth” is about life at its coldest, and the choice you have — whether to let it consume you or find warmth in a world that feels completely void of it. Life is always coming at you and death never stops, so you have to make the most of what you have and keep moving forward.

This track features Gerard Way of My Chemical Romance — we met a couple of years ago and have become friends over time. I knew he had a love for metal, so I threw the idea out there about him being part of a Frozen Soul track, and he was immediately into it. Gerard is an incredible artist and musician whose creative vision has influenced generations, and we’re beyond stoked he found the time to be part of “No Place of Warmth.”

The video was a blast to create, a big collaboration between Brendan McGowen and myself in terms of concept and direction. We brought back London Smith, the actor from our “Morbid Effigy” video, to portray Death. He also appears in some of the other new videos.

In this video, the lead actress is seen burying a dagger wrapped in rosary beads. It’s her way of trying to keep it out of Death’s reach — a statement that we won’t live in fear of what’s coming, and that we’ll choose to live fully, holding onto the memories and experiences we have. The idea is that you can freeze Death, or slow it down—but you can’t stop it. Loss is inevitable. So, live your life, find your place, and don’t let the reality of death take away your happiness while you’re still here.

This also ties directly into our “Invoke War” video, where the dagger is dug back up.

“Invoke War” is the follow-up to [Glacial Domination’s] “Arsenal of War.” While “Arsenal” was about remembering and carrying the light and memories of a loved one with you, this one shifts into something heavier. It features our friend — and someone we’ve looked up to for a long time — Robb Flynn of Machine Head.

This song is about pain and anger. It’s about the struggle with rumination, the constant urge to cast blame for things that were truly out of your control. It’s a journey through the thoughts that don’t let up, the “what ifs,” and the feeling that maybe, somehow, things could have gone differently if the cards had just fallen another way. At its core, this song is about not letting those thoughts consume you completely.

The video went through a few conceptual changes. Originally, we planned something much bigger—a full war room, maps, and a lot of symbolic visuals. But we reflected on where things didn’t fully land with the “Arsenal” video. With “Invoke War,” we wanted to do it right.

We stripped things back and focused on the performance — raw emotion, intensity and honesty. This isn’t a war with armies and actors—it’s the war we fight alone inside ourselves every day. Each of us brought personal items into the video, small trinkets that represent memories and better times. They serve as reminders that even if the battle never truly ends, we can still choose to hold onto those moments as we move forward.

At the end of the video, I dig up the dagger from the “No Place of Warmth” video out of the blood-soaked ground. It’s a symbol of how hard it is to revisit those memories and emotions. The dagger has my brother Cory’s name engraved on the side facing away from the camera. During that scene, I just stared at it, thinking about how much he would’ve loved it—me covered in blood, holding a dagger like that. He would’ve thought it was badass.

“Absolute Zero” is a sledgehammer straight to the head. No bells, no whistles, just pure force right to the noggin. With everything going on in the country right now — with ICE, families being torn apart and people being killed— this track is our stance against authoritarianism, and the scumbags and monsters that are pushing it.

From a writing perspective, we looked back at our older material and realized most of our songs tend to run long. That got us thinking about the hardcore and punk we grew up on — short, explosive tracks that hit hard. So, we decided to take that approach on a few songs for this record. This one comes in at around 50 seconds, and I think it’s one of the coolest songs we’ve ever written. Pun intended.

For the video, we kept it just as direct. I went to the hardware store and picked up the biggest sledgehammer I could find. Sam [Mobley, bassist] carved “Icebreaker” into it. Then I froze a skull I painted, set it up on a cinder block, and completely obliterated it. Because at the end of the day, the best ice is crushed ice.

“Dreadnought” is one of our favorite tracks on the record. We’d had a lot of these riffs sitting around for a while, but [the song] really came together once we got into the studio. We ended up speeding almost the entire song — it’s probably more than double the original tempo — except for the ending. We kept that part slower, so when Sam’s bass comes in it sounds extra nasty.

There’s no deep, underlying meaning behind this one. Lyrically, I pulled inspiration from Terminator 2: Judgment Day and Murderfang from Warhammer 40,000. It’s a good old-fashioned, fun death-metal track. Who better to bring in for that than the beef stick himself, Devin Swank from Sanguisugabogg?

Devin rules. He’s a great friend we’ve spent a lot of time on the road with, and we came up alongside each other. It felt long overdue to finally get on a track together and yell at people in the same song!

“Chaos Will Reign” was meant to be straight to the point. It’s a fun, heavy track about that moment where you’re done taking shit from anyone.

This one might be the coolest video we’ve ever done, and it kind of became a prequel to the “Morbid Effigy” video by accident. I wanted to keep that same twist-ending style we used in “Morbid” as an ode to the old-school horror and sci-fi thrillers I’ve always loved.

At one point, Zach jokingly mentioned us playing inside a snow globe. Sam had actually brought that idea up years ago, but we never thought it was something we could realistically pull off. Then it hit me: What if the audience doesn’t realize we’re inside the snow globe until the very end? Then it zooms out, and — plot twist — it turns out someone used the snow globe as part of a murder!

We brought London back again to play the killer. It worked out perfectly, because I still had the axe from the “Morbid Effigy” shoot. We dressed London up in the same outfit and tied it all together so that the guy he’s killing, played by Zach, is actually the same person the killer turned into a flesh snowman at the end of that other video. Boom, prequel!

“Eyes of Despair” is a classic revenge track. It’s about forcing whatever you’re facing to stare directly into the eyes of your suffering — think of it as positive self-expression through aggression.

Visually and tonally, it’s heavily inspired by Hellraiser and Hellbound: Hellraiser II. It also probably has the heaviest mosh part on the entire record.

And yeah… there’s a hidden machine gun sample in there, too.

“Ethereal Dreams” is based on the story of the Sleeper’s Tomb from EverQuest. It’s a wild piece of game history my brothers and I enjoyed as kids, about an all-powerful dragon that was unkillable. Over time, a series of events led to major guilds coming together to take it down, and right as it was about to die, the developers actually despawned it, claiming players were exploiting a glitch and that the dragon wasn’t actually designed to be killed. The players pushed through anyway, and the developers eventually respawned it so they could claim their victory. As kids, that story blew our minds: The unkillable Sleeper had been defeated.

I took that story and twisted it into something personal. In this version, the Sleeper represents my brother fighting through everything life threw at him. I wanted the lyrics to feel like an ancient scroll, almost like a fable about a great warrior who was laid to rest but destined to return one day.

At its core, the song is about protecting his legacy, and making sure it’s not defined by the things that took him from us. To me, he’ll always be my little brother, the kid who loved getting lost in the adventure of a good game. At the end of the song, I break away from that storytelling style and speak directly to him. It’s a message that somehow, someday — in some new and unknown adventure — we’ll find each other again.

This track also pays respect to the Texas hardcore scene my brothers and I grew up in. The phrasing, terminology and vocal rhythms are a nod not just to playing games like EverQuest, but also to the bands that helped shape us and pull us into that underground world, like Iron Age, Bitter End, Power Trip, Mammoth Grinder and more.

“Skinned by the Wind” is built around a riff we’ve loved for a long time. Instead of overcomplicating it or writing a bunch of parts around it, we decided to just let that riff be the song. Sometimes the simplest approach hits the hardest.

And honestly, “Skinned by the Wind” sounds sick. It has a great ring to it. This was one of those ideas that really came together in the studio.

“DEATHWEAVER” is about how, over time, you slowly lose pieces of yourself while gaining new perspectives. It’s about weaving together the memories of your life’s experiences to form who you are, while facing the cruel nature of life and the cycle of death. From there, I built a story around a character who turns the veins, nerves and bones of their victims into a musical instrument — a harp.

I pushed hard for this track to get a video because I knew it had the potential to be insane, visually. A lot of it came together last minute, but talking with Sam we knew one thing for sure: We needed a harp made of bones and flesh.

I reached out to my friend Eric, who runs an animation studio in Denver, and we started talking about 3D printing. Turns out he had multiple large printers, so he helped design and print the bone harp in 27 separate pieces. He shipped it to me, and I spent five days putting it together — filling seams, sanding it down, and teaching myself how to airbrush to make the bone look real.

At its core, the video tells the story of a woman who has lived for centuries endlessly chasing the idea of creating the perfect harp. In her mind, it’s art and purpose.

I feel like this song ties the entire record together. It actually started as something inspired by Magic: The Gathering, specifically one of my favorite cards: Etali, Primal Conqueror. From there, I began blending the larger-than-life, godlike dinosaur energy and sense of epic adventure I’ve always felt playing Magic [through the lens of] my own personal experiences — learning to accept things, trying to understand them, and dealing with how life constantly throws challenges at you when you have no idea what to do next.

At its core, the song is about taking the cold — the frost that builds up inside you over time — and turning it into something powerful. It’s about using that to forge yourself into someone capable of handling whatever life throws your way — not just for yourself, but for the people you care about. We had everyone come together to record gang vocals for the chorus, which really helped bring it to life.

At first, I wasn’t a huge fan of “Killin’ Time (Until It’s Time to Kill).” I thought it leaned too melodic and wasn’t heavy enough, especially since we wanted this record to hit harder than Glacial Domination. But as we got deeper into finishing songs in the studio, I had a moment where I stepped back and thought, “Why am I taking this so seriously?”

The riffs are killer, it’s catchy, and it taps into the same kind of feel we love from rock and country, so why not just embrace it? We leaned all the way in and made a fun, offbeat death-metal track with a tongue-in-cheek charm. I actually had some lyrics sitting around from a joke death-metal/country solo project idea I had. When I started singing them over these riffs, everything just clicked.

At its core, it’s a simple concept: It’s about someone killing time… until it’s time to kill. The twist is, he doesn’t really want to stop chilling. So, the whole song plays out like he’s casually talking to the person he’s about to kill, as if they’re buddies. They’re just hanging out, until the realization hits that their time’s up.

In the end — as much as he’d rather keep kickin’ it — those icy veins have to be obeyed and blood has to spill.