Berklee alum Lucy Frost speaks about her debut album and wanting “people to feel the acceptance of not knowing exactly who you are yet.”
Many may be familiar with the universal ritual of a parent placing a bottle of gummy vitamins in front of them at breakfast, promising that a daily dose is the secret to staying healthy. Children chew the vitamin without thinking, fold it into their routine, fall off, and start the cycle again. Lucy Frost’s debut album, Vitamins, released August 18, lives inside that same loop, tracing the cycles that lead to burnout, exhaustion, and a kind of quiet existential fatigue that is rarely named out loud.
Frost, who grew up in Boston and now splits her time between LA and the occasional stretch back home, described her sound as “a mix of indie rock, singer-songwriter, alt-pop.” But ask her what actually anchors it, and she doesn’t hesitate: “songwriting…it’s narrative.” There’s a cinematic quality running underneath that narrative pull, and it isn’t an accident. It traces back to her time at Berklee College of Music, where she studied film and media scoring rather than the traditional singer-songwriter track.
Frost described growing up playing the piano, first teaching herself before taking lessons. “I always had that fascination with film scores and orchestral music,” she said. “There’s this raw feeling you get listening to a movie soundtrack – it’s so emotional, and it just hits so hard.” She picked up guitar on her own later and recalled that switching between instruments unlocked “new possibilities for storytelling and soundscape.”
Her background in scoring shaped more than her ear – it shaped how she thinks about a song as a complete world. “I chose that major because I never thought of myself as a singer-songwriter,” she explained. “I think it’s just helped me see a song as a whole – not just the lyrics, not just the melody, but the intricate little details. So much of this album comes from me being a film scorer, wanting to narrate that, and learning how to produce on my own.”
One Vitamin a Day Keeps the Doctor Away
Vitamins traces the arc of a relationship – from the initial excitement, through the unraveling, to eventually something like healing – but Frost is quick to note the songs weren’t all written in one clean burst. Most came together over the past few years. What ties them together isn’t chronology so much as a feeling she kept revisiting.
“I think I’ve realized I’ve been battling this struggle of ‘who am I’ and ‘what am I doing,’” she remarked. “That internal back and forth of feeling one way and then feeling the complete opposite. I’ve reached points where I’ve thought, ‘this is the direction I want to go,’ and it’s great, and then I’ve felt the total opposite and wanted to do something else.”
The vitamin metaphor came from somewhere unexpectedly literal: an eponymous song that was eventually taken off the album. The song title “stuck with [her],” and when she moved to LA to continue her career, the question of what direction to take was ever-present. Whether the shelved title track ever surfaces is still an open question. Frost expressed that she keeps returning to the idea of dropping the song on its own someday.
Interestingly, several of the album’s most narratively “addicted” songs – full of prescription, lines, and morphine imagery – draw from a past relationship rather than substance use. “I don’t do drugs,” she clarified, “but I’ve felt addicted to things, felt withdrawal from things, felt numb. All of those feelings kept circling back into the songs I was writing.” That thread runs even through the album’s more upbeat, sonically playful tracks, like “Shit Kicker” and “Video Games,” songs that sound bright but sit on the same dark lyrical bedrock as the rest of the record.
Writing Through Burnout, Online and Off
Frost was candid about how the pressure to constantly self-promote online shaped, and at times stalled, the writing process. “It’s hard, because you talk to someone in the industry and they say, ‘it’s so much easier now, you can get your music heard so easily.’ And that’s true, and it’s been a blessing in some ways,” she admitted. “But it’s also made it so you don’t feel as creative. I think it forces people to become an influencer in some way, whether they want to or not.”
The tension that comes with online promotion surfaces on the album in songs like “Real,” where Frost describes the daily grind of posting, performing authenticity, and being told the algorithm rewards effortlessness that never actually feels effortless. “It’s not easy,” she said, “and it requires a lot of patience and a lot of time. It is a job that you have to undertake, and as a musician, I didn’t go into this wanting to do that.” She’s since found pockets of the process she genuinely enjoys, as video editing in particular, which has made posting feel less like performance and more like an extension of the creative work itself.
Balancing that outward-facing pressure with the perfectionism of finishing the record was its own battle. “I’m the most impatient person when it comes to my music, because I just want it out,” she reflected. “But I’m also such a perfectionist. Those things clash all the time. Nothing is ever going to be perfect. It’s been a good learning experience of just letting it go.”
Vulnerability, Humor, and “Honey, If You’re Listening”
Frost’s lyrics carry a tongue-in-cheek streak even at their heaviest, which is something she traces back to an unlikely source. “I listen to a lot of country and folk, and my dad’s always been into that,” she said. “There are these morals at the end of a song, [and there’s] something poetic about it. That tongue-in-cheek humor can come through there too. I gravitate toward clever lyrics.”
The most vulnerable moment on the record, by her own account, is “Honey, If You’re Listening,” a sprawling, nearly five-minute track built without a traditional chorus. “I was so attached to the original demo, just because it’s so raw,” Frost said. “The song is about writing dark music…music has always been an outlet for me, a way to release things I don’t know how to talk about.” Structurally, she credits her love of country, folk, and blues songwriting and artists like Bob Dylan, where not every song needs a chorus, for giving her permission to let the song run its own length. “I couldn’t take a single part of that song out. It’s what makes it what it is.”
Looking Ahead
When asked what she hopes listeners take from Vitamins, Frost circled back to the title’s central idea. “Every song is like a vitamin,” she said. “You take it to help. I’m not giving any solutions. I just want people to feel the acceptance of not knowing exactly who you are yet.”
Frost remarked that writing the album helped her find something closer to her own voice, including on the closing track, which she described as about killing off an earlier version of herself. “It’s all about rebirth,” she stated. “I’m on the right track somehow. I might not know all the answers, but I’m on the other side of something that was confusing.”
As for what’s next: more music, and, for Boston fans hoping to catch her live, a possible return to the stages where she got her start. “I’m sitting on a lot more songs, so we’ve got to get moving with those,” Frost said. “I’m such a studio rat, I cannot wait to get back in and just keep working.”
Vitamins is out now.