Eternal Rhythm: Grant McLennan and Steve Kilbey's Jack Frost
Jack Frost was never meant to be a career move. When Steve Kilbey of The Church and Grant McLennan of The Go-Betweens joined forces in the early ’90s, it wasn’t some calculated supergroup stunt or label-driven experiment. It was more like two old friends finding a moment of reprieve from their respective mythologies. By that point, both had long since carved their names into the indie rock granite—Kilbey with his cosmic detachment and sculpted abstraction, McLennan with his tender-eyed clarity and literary warmth. Jack Frost wasn’t about legacy. It was about the quiet compulsion to keep creating, even if no one was asking.
Their 1991 self-titled debut feels less like a side project and more like a transmission from a private world. The album doesn’t announce itself; it murmurs, it drifts, it lingers in doorways. You can hear the mutual respect in every track—Kilbey’s foggy, opiated textures folding neatly around McLennan’s melodies. “Every Hour God Sends” sounds like a confession whispered through a wall; “Thought That I Was Over You” hums with the kind of resignation that only arrives after the heartbreak has settled in and made itself at home. It’s music for late nights when the past feels closer than the future.
By the time they regrouped for Snow Job in 1996, the mood had shifted slightly. If the debut was a half-lit dream, Snow Job was the cold morning after. The production tightened, the songwriting crystallized, but the emotional temperature stayed wintry and remote. Songs like “Number Eleven” and “You’re So Strange” suggest two men still wrapped in introspection, still chasing some unspoken clarity, but maybe with a little more detachment. There’s a sense that they knew this would be the end, and they made peace with it.
Jack Frost wasn’t built to last—and that may be why it still resonates. There’s something inherently beautiful about music made without a roadmap, without a plan for permanence. These were two men in mid-career, standing at the quiet edges of their fame, indulging in a project that asked for nothing and, in return, gave them something rare: creative companionship unburdened by ambition. The records they left behind don’t beg for rediscovery. They simply exist, like a pair of letters never mailed but never thrown away—frozen moments, waiting to be thawed by someone who didn't know they were looking for them.
Easy Action have compiled their recordings on As Seen On TV, order here