FROZEN CROWN Trivia — 112 Entries
112 sourced facts about FROZEN CROWN.
Trivia
The debut reached shops in Japan before anywhere else. Marquee Inc. / Avalon Label issued it on 24 January 2018 as MICP-11393 at 2,860 yen including tax, roughly a fortnight ahead of the 9 February international release. The pattern held from there: every Frozen Crown album up to War Hearts appeared in Japan several days to two weeks before it appeared elsewhere.
The third Japanese visit was the biggest thing the band had done there. The promoter, Marquee/Avalon, billed it as the largest Japan tour of their career, taking in the band's first two-night Tokyo stand and their first Osaka show: 25 and 26 September 2025 at Daikanyama Space Odd, and the 28th at Osaka RUIDO. After two single-night visits, this was the first time they played more than one date in the country.
The two Tokyo nights were built not as separate concerts but as one continuous story. The first, "The Night of the Shieldmaiden", was centred on the power metal songs carried by Giada Etro's clean voice; the second, "The Night of the Tyrant", on the aggressive, growl-driven material. The promoter's phrase for it was a package in which two nights complete a single story. The first-ever Osaka date, "The Night of the Ice Dragon", was given a special set list different from both.
The video for "On Silver Wings", released on 18 May 2026, was built out of that Japanese tour. Alongside newly shot material it uses footage from the September 2025 Japanese shows, and its credits thank Marquee Avalon, BURRN! magazine and Yasuharu Takanashi. Giada Etro calls the song her favourite on War Hearts and says the video closes the cycle of the band's first Napalm album.
By Mondelli's own account the band did not begin in Italy. He was in Japan playing with his hard rock band Be The Wolf when he put the idea — at that stage a solo project — to the label Avalon, and it was the support that came back from that country, he says, that brought Frozen Crown into existence. He said so in an Italian interview given ahead of the band's return to Japan in 2023.
Mondelli has also described what that support actually consisted of. Marquee/Avalon in Japan is the sister label of Europe's Scarlet Records, and in his telling it was the Japanese company that made Frozen Crown possible at all: they believed in the project he had and put up the money that let him go into a studio and record. He said this on the European tour of 2019, the year the band first played Japan.
That Japanese edition was not merely the international one with a track added. By Mondelli's account the Japanese pressing of The Fallen King differs substantially from the Western version in its cover art and in the interior of its booklet as well. The extra track is an acoustic version of "The Shieldmaiden". He also notes how well the record was received in Japan, and credits support there from BURRN! magazine and from figures such as Masa Ito.
The band's first Japanese show fell on Friday 12 April 2019 at TSUTAYA O-WEST in Shibuya, Tokyo, billed as "Crowned In Tokyo". The house lights went down at seven sharp; "The Wolf And The Maiden" played as an intro tape while Mondelli, Mezzanotte, Zavattari and Bellazecca took the stage and opened with "Arctic Gales", and Giada Etro appeared at the top of the following song, "Neverending". Twenty-one items, about two hours. The same room would take them back four years later under a new name, Spotify O-WEST.
Halfway through that first Tokyo show came a detail only buyers of the Japanese edition would have caught. After a drum solo, the interlude tape was "The King's Rest" — the Japanese bonus track. Mondelli then came out alone, told the audience that Be The Wolf would be playing Japan that June, and played a short piece of X JAPAN's ballad "Tears", with the crowd singing the chorus alongside him.
The Japanese edition of the sixth album is set for 30 September 2026, two days ahead of the 2 October international release, in two configurations: a standard CD, MICP-12030, and a strictly limited SHM-CD plus CD set, MICP-30244/5. The limited edition adds a bonus disc holding four recordings — a cover of Blind Guardian's "Mirror Mirror", an acoustic cover of Kamelot's "Center Of The Universe", and acoustic versions of "Reborn" and of "Mirror Mirror". Internationally those four are said to be confined to a 300-copy wooden box, so the Japanese limited edition offers the same content by another route. The album proper is the same ten tracks in both Japanese configurations, with no Japan-only bonus track.
Her first show with Frozen Crown was on Saturday 10 May 2025 at the Legend Club in Milan, the closing night of the band's first European headline tour — and the same room where the band had played its very first concert on 9 February 2018. By the band's account she learned the entire setlist at very short notice and performed it flawlessly. Her second show was Metalfest in Plzeň, and by Summer Breeze that August she had played five shows with them.
The fifth of the album's ten tracks is not their own song. It is a cover of "Iris", the Goo Goo Dolls' 1998 American hit, arranged as power metal in a reading that the label describes as moving between waltz-time ballad and high-speed drumming. One alternative-rock ballad, sitting among a run of high-fantasy titles.
The name was chosen for its shape as much as its meaning. Federico Mondelli has said the band wanted something forceful that anyone of any nationality could both understand and remember, and that one of his conditions was that it be built from two words — he lists Celtic Frost, Iron Maiden, Iced Earth and Blind Guardian as the models he had in mind. Frozen Crown fitted the icy, majestic and at the same time barbaric scenery the band was picturing when it formed.
Asked who the fallen king of the title actually is, Mondelli did not answer with a character. The fallen king is metal itself. He describes the album as a tribute to power metal, and says plainly that it deliberately attempts nothing new in stylistic terms.
The second album's title comes from outside power metal. Mondelli has said Crowned in Frost is a reference to Crowned in Terror by the Swedish death metal band The Crown. In the same interview he adds that the song "Winterbane" was inspired by Abbath of Immortal.
The Judas Priest cover was the singer's own choice. Giada Etro has said she sang covers with her first band between the ages of sixteen and eighteen, that "Night Crawler" takes her back to that time, and that it mattered to her to mark that part of her growth as a singer and a musician somehow. To make it sit properly for her, she tuned the song up by a whole step.
The title Call of the North comes out of where Mondelli is from. He is a southerner — born in Puglia, with half his family in Civitavecchia in Lazio — and has always been drawn northward; coming from the sea, he says, the north held a great fascination for him. For the sleeve he names as inspirations covers like Immortal's At the Heart of Winter and Obituary's Frozen in Time, with their isolated structures shut inside a valley of ice.
Why a third guitarist? The band's answer is direct: they have never put guitars into their backing tracks and never will, using only a few keyboard sequences at crucial points. But the studio recordings stack dozens of guitar layers, so with two players the harmonised leads left nothing underneath them, and songs had to be re-arranged live with parts sacrificed. Adding a person was the alternative to carrying on cutting things out.
There is a specific reason the title track opens the album: it is the song on which Alessia Lanzone plays the first guitar solo, as Mondelli told Guitar World. "War Hearts" was the first song written for the record and the first to carry a solo of hers — the newcomer's playing placed at the album's front door.
The sixth album, The Legend Of The Six Kings, was announced on 26 May 2026 for release on 2 October — the band's second record for Napalm Records. Its central conceit is stated outright: it draws directly on the debut, The Fallen King, and continues the saga of the Kings and the Tyrant. The tyrant put under the ice on the second album returns eight years later. At the time of writing the record is not yet out, and what follows is only what has been announced.
The band's prehistory runs through Japan as well. By Mondelli's own account he formed the hard rock band Be The Wolf around 2011 with Marco Verdone, Paul Canetti and former member Francesco Priolo; Scarlet Records noticed them in 2015, and Marquee Avalon in Japan subsequently brought them over to play. It is that relationship that put him in a position to take the Frozen Crown idea to a Japanese label at all.
Be The Wolf won BURRN! magazine's readers' poll for Best Upcoming Act — its Brightest Hope award — and on the strength of that Mondelli was invited to write a monthly column for the magazine, which by his own account he still writes. It runs under the title "THE YOUNG WOLF FROM WEST". An Italian guitarist holding a standing column in a Japanese metal monthly says most of what needs saying about how close he is to the country.
The Japanese edition of the second album, Crowned in Frost, came out on 20 March 2019 as MICP-11475 at 2,860 yen, with "The King's Rest" added as a twelfth track. The international release followed on the 22nd of the same month, so Japan was two days ahead again.
Call of the North reached Japan on 8 March 2023 as MICP-11760, at 3,000 yen with one bonus track, two days ahead of the 10 March international release. The label's own product page for the album shows a date of 1 March 2023 — but the same label's March 2023 new-release listing, the official information reproduced in the press, and every Japanese retailer all agree on the 8th.
That Tokyo night went ahead in the middle of a typhoon. In a video description the band write that the show happened despite the storm, that they played a two-hour set list called "Call Of Tokyo", and that it was the biggest and most successful concert of their career — their own assessment of their own show.
With the fifth album one Japanese custom lapsed. War Hearts appeared in Japan on 16 October 2024 as MICP-11870 at 3,100 yen — two days ahead of the 18 October international release, as usual — but with no bonus track. On the label's own October 2024 new-release sheet, eight of the eleven titles listed carry an explicit "one bonus track added" flag, and the Frozen Crown entry is not one of them.
The Japanese press puts the same story one step further. In BURRN!'s report on the band's 2025 Japanese tour, Frozen Crown is traced back to a solo album Mondelli set out to make as a way of thanking Japanese listeners, off the back of what had happened to Be The Wolf there. It is the reason an Italian band has had a Japanese centre of gravity from the beginning.
There are four Japanese bonus tracks in all, one on each of the first four albums, and two of them remain compact-disc exclusives: the acoustic "The Shieldmaiden" from The Fallen King and the "Acoustic Medley" from Call of the North. The other two — "The King's Rest" from Crowned in Frost and "Blood On The Snow (Spooky Version)" from Winterbane — were carried over onto Japan-edition digital releases and can be heard there.
That bonus track is not an offcut. Japanese product data gives "The King's Rest" a running time of 3:54 and classifies it as a studio recording — against 1:24 for the album's overture "Arctic Gales" and 1:03 for its interlude "Enthroned", which makes it a piece in its own right. It carries a composer credit to Federico Mondelli and no lyricist credit at all, the same shape as the album's three instrumentals and unlike its nine sung tracks.
The Japanese edition of Winterbane appeared on 21 April 2021 as MICP-11610 at 2,970 yen, adding "Blood On The Snow (Spooky Version)" as an eleventh track. Japanese product data gives it a running time of 9:00 against 8:43 for the album version — seventeen seconds longer — and it keeps a lyricist credit, so it is a version with vocals. What exactly makes it "spooky" is not explained by any source that could be found.
The Japanese bonus track, "Acoustic Medley", sits as track eleven and runs 2:39. Product data lists it as a studio recording performed by Frozen Crown, composed and arranged by Federico Mondelli, with no lyricist credited. What it is a medley of, however, is not stated anywhere that could be found — and since it was never issued digitally, there is no streaming metadata to infer it from either.
The second Japanese visit was a single night. On Friday 2 June 2023 the band played "Call Of The North Japan Release Show — Call Of Tokyo" at Spotify O-WEST in Shibuya, doors at 18:00 and stage at 19:00, promoted by Marquee Inc. It was the same room as the 2019 debut; only the name had changed, from TSUTAYA O-WEST.
The set ran past two hours. The main body closed with Judas Priest's "Night Crawler" — the cover they had put on Winterbane — and the encore added five songs and more besides. The setlist printed by Young Guitar runs to nineteen numbered items including intro tapes, ending with "The Shieldmaiden".
The opening act on the first Tokyo night was the Japanese band Mana Diagram. According to BURRN!'s report their vocalist, UYU, said that seeing Frozen Crown's Japanese show two years earlier had made her wish to share a stage with them one day. Less than eight years from their debut, the Italians had become a band that younger Japanese acts looked up to.
For the two newest guitarists it was a first visit to Japan. In BURRN!'s interview both Alexandra Lioness and Alessia Lanzone said they had never been before; the band had arrived on the Monday and were on their fifth day when they spoke. There had not been much sightseeing, but they had been to Meiji Jingu and Harajuku and walked back from Harajuku to Shibuya, and Giada Etro had added to her stage wardrobe at a shop full of metal-looking clothes.
On his own website Mondelli sets out the order plainly. He first proposed the thing to the Japanese label as a solo project, and only then brought in a female vocalist — Giada "Jade" Etro — to widen what it could do. The band, in other words, did not start from a singer and find a home for her; it found a home first and looked for the singer afterwards.
The band and its labels do not agree on a founding year. Napalm Records' 2024 biography says the band was founded in 2017; the band itself, announcing its Napalm signing in 2023, wrote that it had run everything alone "since founding it in 2018", and in a 2025 statement referred to "our very first show back in 2018". The documented dates are firmer. Scarlet Records announced the complete five-piece and a finished debut album on 24 November 2017, the first single "The Shieldmaiden" followed on 20 December 2017, and the band played in public for the first time on 9 February 2018 at the Legend Club in Milan. METAL BOOST prints those dates rather than choosing a founding year.
Scarlet Records' first announcement, dated 24 November 2017, laid the whole band out at once. Songwriting rested on Federico Mondelli of Be The Wolf, on vocals, guitar and keyboards, with Giada Etro — of Ashes You Leave and Tystnaden — out front. The rest was guitarist Talia Bellazecca, whom the announcement introduces as seventeen years old, bassist Filippo Zavattari and drummer Alberto Mezzanotte. The debut, The Fallen King, already had its release date: 9 February 2018.
In 2019 the band began appearing at the larger European festivals. At Sabaton Open Air in Falun, Sweden, they played at 14:30 on Saturday 17 August — the gates opened at 14:00, which made them the first band of the day. That same year they were on the confirmed bill for Metalfest Open Air in Pilsen, Czech Republic, held from 31 May to 2 June.
The important one was the DragonForce run. On 11 December 2019 DragonForce announced on their own site that Frozen Crown would join them as special guests on their European shows in February 2020, with Athanasia opening. The same announcement summed up Frozen Crown's live record to that point as two European tours, one headlining tour of Japan, and a number of European shows including Sabaton Open Air and Metal Fest Plzen.
The band has looked back on that stretch more bluntly. In a video description posted in 2026 they write that once the 2020 DragonForce support tour was over the only members left were the founders, Jade and Federico; that they were then trying to recruit the seventeen-year-old drummer Niso Tomasini; and that they had to rebuild the band from scratch.
Winterbane carries two departures from the usual. One is "Angels In Disguise", with a guest vocal by Federica Lanna of Volturian; the other is a Judas Priest cover, "Night Crawler". Announcing the album on 12 February 2021 the label said only that it was a song from Painkiller — the title itself came out in the track listing published alongside.
The lyrics of the first single, "Far Beyond", have two sources. The label credits the poetry of Dylan Thomas and Christopher Nolan's film Interstellar. Elsewhere Mondelli has owned up to a third borrowing in the same song: the "No, no!" that lands before the chorus was consciously taken from Yngwie Malmsteen's "I'll See The Light Tonight".
The new line-up got an unexpected showcase. The announcement accompanying the "Far Beyond" video said that the newly arrived Sheena and Federico would be appearing on DragonForce guitarist Herman Li's Twitch stream — an event raising money for Jason Becker. The guitarist of the band that had taken them out on tour the year before was making room for them just as they finished rebuilding.
One of the singles needs a caveat. "Victorious" is not a music video but an official visualizer, published on the Scarlet Records channel on 18 January 2023 as the second single; its description carries no director, camera or editing credit, only the audio ones. Of the album's four singles, only "Call Of The North" and "Fire In The Sky" name a director in their official uploads — Luca Morselli and Mondelli jointly in both cases — while the third, "Black Heart", names none.
The production set-up changes here. The Legend of the Six Kings is credited as produced by Federico Mondelli, recorded by Andrea Sala Danna at The Central Recording Studio, and mixed and mastered by Andrea Fusini. Fusini had produced, recorded, mixed and mastered the preceding album, War Hearts, so the sixth record is where the production credit passes to Mondelli.
The Blind Guardian cover at the centre of that bonus disc had a six-year run-up. By the band's account work on "Mirror Mirror" began in 2020 and was shelved when the Winterbane sessions took over; it was finished and released on 4 February 2026. It was built from up to six layers of acoustic guitar, one bass track and as many as twelve vocal tracks, and was mixed and mastered by Andrea Sala Danna at The Central Studio.
It was Giada Etro who wanted that song. The band describe it as one she had wanted to cover forever, and in her own words it is one of the most significant songs in her life, both for her growth as a musician and as a reader of Tolkien. Given that the sixth album is built on Tolkien's world, the choice is not a coincidence.
In 2026 the band works North America and then Europe back to back. They open all twenty-three dates of Kamelot's Dark Asylum World Tour across North America, from 28 August in Orlando to 27 September in Silver Spring, and from 26 October to 25 November they support Beast In Black in Europe, with Sonata Arctica as special guests on that run. They had already toured Europe with Kamelot in autumn 2024, so this is their second time out with them.
Frozen Crown is not Mondelli's only band. Volturian is a project he founded in January 2020 with Federica Lanna of Sleeping Romance, completed by Frozen Crown's then drummer Alberto Mezzanotte and bassist Massimiliano Rossi, with Giada Etro guesting. Its debut, Crimson, came out on 24 April 2020 on Scarlet Records for Europe and the US and on Marquee Avalon in Japan — exactly the same distribution shape as Frozen Crown.
Even the merchandise has its own name on it. Giada Etro and Federico Mondelli founded a clothing brand called Ice Dragon, and it acts as the umbrella under which the merchandise for Frozen Crown, Nocturna, Volturian and Be The Wolf is handled. A band that draws its own sleeves and shoots its own videos runs its clothing through its own company too.
The departed members can be followed afterwards. On her own site Thalia Bellazecca records that she joined Angus McSix in June 2022, at that band's very beginning, and that on 28 August 2024 she became a member of Primal Fear alongside Magnus Karlsson. She also writes that she joined Frozen Crown in September 2017 at the age of seventeen, and that it was the first band that let her tour and play festivals.
The two-word formula has a more specific model behind it. Mondelli has said that lyrically and visually the band's first inspiration was Celtic Frost, to the point that Frozen Crown quote some of their phrases inside their own songs. The name itself, he says, was built as a pair of words made to sound a little like Celtic Frost — and a little like Iced Earth.
The push to make it a real band came from the label side. Mondelli's account is that he took the project to Scarlet Records and to Marquee Avalon in Japan, and that they liked it enough to suggest turning it into a proper group. He brought in his friend Filippo Zavattari on bass first; the drummer, Alberto Mezzanotte, is Zavattari's cousin and was proposed by him; lead guitarist Talia Bellazecca came last.
The singer was chosen by something close to an open audition. Mondelli tried several candidates before settling on Giada Etro, and what decided it was that most of the voices he heard were operatic while hers was more aggressive. He did not know her personally — he knew only the names of the bands she had sung with, Tystnaden and Ashes You Leave.
Mondelli has a compact way of describing that voice: Etro sings more aggressively and less operatically than others on the scene, and what he saw in her was a female version of Timo Kotipelto. In the same interview he said he would certainly not use the word "power" for what the band plays, offering instead the description "melodic death metal with clean vocals".
In Mondelli's own phrasing, Frozen Crown was supposed to stay a simple studio project. He did feel the need for a female voice from the outset, to add shading and potential to what he was making, which is why Etro came in as lead singer; the decision to turn it into an actual band came after that.
Mondelli calls the record an atypical concept album. Its songs do not run a single narrative in order; what binds them is an epic atmosphere, much of it drawn from Norse mythology. Behind the heroic imagery, though, he says the songs are almost always about inner battles.
The writing on the debut is almost all Mondelli's, with one exception. The ballad "Chasing Lights" is Giada Etro's song, and she wrote three sets of lyrics besides. He put the rest together himself, he says, simply because the full line-up came together after work had already started. The drum parts were another matter: Alberto Mezzanotte both arranged and recorded all of them.
The video for "Kings" was made on no budget. It was shot by the Varese-based videomaker Andrea De Taddeo, with Valerio Sacchetto as director of photography and drone footage by Michel Maresca, at Passo Forcora and Lago d'Elio near Lake Maggiore. There was no money for a crew, so by Mondelli's account the band pitched in on the shoot themselves.
It is Mondelli, not Etro, who takes the lead vocal on "I Am The Tyrant", and there is a reason he wears a mask in its video: at the time, he says, he did not want to overshadow Jade as the band's frontwoman. He wrote, directed and edited the clip himself, and designed the mask and the art direction with it.
The song from the debut the whole band most likes to play live, Mondelli says, is "Queen Of Blades". His own favourite is a different one — "The Shieldmaiden", which he believes is the best thing on the record. That was also the track chosen as the first single, picked because it is a long power metal piece on which both he and Etro sing.
There is a design to the running order too. Mondelli explains that "Queen Of Blades" takes up the theme of the ballad placed immediately before it, "Chasing Lights", and that the album is built as a continuous arc — dipping at "Chasing Lights" and rising again with "Queen Of Blades".
The band's first appearance in front of an audience fell on the album's release day itself: 9 February 2018, the launch party for The Fallen King at the Legend Club in Milan. Mondelli says the room was literally packed, with the curious, with friends, and with people the first single had already won over. The same venue returns to this story seven years later.
The debut's reception moved things along quickly. In September 2018 Frozen Crown joined the roster of the international booking agency Nine Lives Entertainment — a roster the band itself described as including Stratovarius and Hammerfall. Seven months after the album, they had the machinery to tour Europe.
The second album quietly continues the first one's story. Mondelli explains that the king frozen under the ice at the start of "Winterfall" is the tyrant sung about on the debut — and that freezing him was more than a plot device. Putting that male-voiced character on ice was a deliberate signal that male vocals would be reduced from then on, because Frozen Crown is a female-fronted band.
A line from the first album is embedded in the second. Mondelli says the phrase "fail no more" inside "Neverending" is a deliberate quotation of the debut's opening track "Fail No More". He also says he models his album openers on the first two Sonata Arctica records: an opener should be fast and technical, and should never be a ballad or a long song.
The sleeves continue the story too. Mondelli explains that the woman on the front of Crowned in Frost is the same woman as on The Fallen King — only larger now, hardened by battle and more experienced. He drew the artwork himself, as he did for all four of the band's Scarlet-era albums.
The second album was in practice the work of two people plus a drummer. Mondelli recorded all the guitars, all the keyboards and the bass himself, so the only musicians actually playing on the studio record are him, Etro and the drummer. The band had been presented as a five-piece and photographed as one; the division of labour on the disc did not match.
The writing itself was fitted to the singer. Mondelli says the songs on Crowned in Frost were written across a spread of keys — F, F sharp, B and E — chosen so that each would sit well for Etro's voice. He writes not what he wants but what works for her, he says, because she is the face of the band.
Barely a year separates the first album from the second, but Mondelli says it was not rushed. "Winterfall" and "Neverending" were already finished while The Fallen King was still awaiting release — the second record's frame, in other words, was in place before the first one had even come out.
On 29 January 2021 the band announced that three of its five members had gone: drummer Alberto Mezzanotte, guitarist Thalía Bellazecca and bassist Filippo Zavattari. The statement says each of them decided to leave "at different times during last year" to concentrate on their own projects — not a simultaneous walkout, then, but a sequence spread across 2020 and announced together once the year had turned. Released alongside it was a video for "Battles In The Night" from Crowned in Frost, put out as a last piece of footage marking the end of the "classic" line-up.
Mondelli later gave a sequence for those departures. In his account the drummer left immediately after the 2020 DragonForce run and was replaced at once by Niso Tomasini, then seventeen and already writing Winterbane with them; the bassist and guitarist left much later, when the band was about to go into the studio. He also says the three who left had contributed to neither the writing nor the recording. The band's own January 2021 statement says only that they left "at different times during last year" and names no one's date.
The three replacements were introduced on 18 February 2021: Fabiola "Sheena" Bellomo on lead guitar, Francesco Zof on bass and Niso Tomasini on drums. The band said it had been very hard to find suitable people during the pandemic — and all three had already played on the as-yet-unreleased Winterbane. The clip used to introduce them before their faces were shown was a fragment of "Embrace The Night", the album's opening track.
The way the new guitarist was found is very much of 2020. Mondelli came across Fabiola "Sheena" Bellomo on social media, having watched videos of her playing Killswitch Engage and Bullet For My Valentine songs. He got in touch because he thought her rhythm playing was accurate — and because she lived very close to where he had just moved. Picking someone far away, he says, would have been absurd at a time when nobody could travel. He was not searching specifically for a woman: a fairly good male guitarist was also in the frame, but he lived a long way off.
Mondelli says he still does not know why Thalia Bellazecca left. In his account he had asked her to play some solos for the third album's recording and she had seemed pleased about it; then she told the label's owner she was going, and he learned of her departure through the label. Bellazecca's own account of it does not appear in the article.
Winterbane was produced by Andrea Fusini at Fusix Studio in Turin. The cover was drawn, as before, by Mondelli himself, and the label described what it depicts as the band facing its own former self. Scarlet presented the record as the band's darkest and heaviest, one that stepped back from symphonic elements and keyboards in favour of a straightforward approach.
It was Giada Etro who wrote "The Water Dancer". Mondelli describes it as a song avowedly drawn from the world of A Song of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones, while adding that the band's wider reference points are Italian folklore and sword-and-sorcery in the Conan mould rather than elves and orcs — witches, and big ugly brutes out on the moors, in a more primitive world.
For "The Water Dancer" the band brought in an outside element for the first time. The clip, co-directed by Luca Morselli and Mondelli, features wolfdogs supplied by Damien Von Dunkenwald and his Northern Wolfdogs Pack — an unusual arrangement for a band that had handled its own visuals up to then.
Giada Etro has a simple explanation for why the line-up upheaval left the songwriting untouched: she and Federico are the ones who write. In the same interview she notes that there is always one long track on a Frozen Crown album — "Blood On The Snow" being that track here — and says it is where they experimented most with the guitar, bass and vocal parts.
Call of the North is, Mondelli says, the album written over the longest span. It holds not only songs from the previous two years but pieces he had sketched five or six years earlier, around the time the debut was taking shape — material he left alone and picked up again only when he judged it genuinely ready.
Announcing the album on 26 November 2022, the band said it deliberately carried no guest appearances at all: the aim was for it to sound "100% Frozen Crown". At the same time they promised features they had not used before, naming acoustic ballads and epic choirs. Production was once again by Andrea Fusini at Fusix Studio in Turin.
Releasing "Victorious" as the album's second single, the band warned listeners not to be misled by its intro — it is, they said, the fastest song Frozen Crown have ever written.
The writing method changed around this record. Mondelli writes all the melodies, but gives drummer Niso Tomasini wide latitude over the rhythmic arrangement — which then reshapes the melodies themselves. The two of them build a song's primitive stage and the singer comes in after that. The songs are founded on the voice above all, and he always tries to write something that can be tailored to Etro; the bass and Fabiola Bellomo's lead parts are added afterwards, as embellishment.
In the same interview Mondelli draws his own line for when Frozen Crown became a band. The first two albums and half of the third were a solo project; after that it turned into a genuine group, because Niso Tomasini and bassist Francesco Zof are decisive in shaping the final form of the songs.
The show nearly did not happen. At soundcheck the bridge pickup on Mondelli's Jackson KV7 failed and he was not satisfied with the spare; he announced he would go out and buy a new guitar, then that he would drop guitar altogether and only sing, before finally deciding to get through the night on the neck pickup alone. He and Fabiola Bellomo played Jackson signature models exclusively that evening — his the Corey Beaulieu (Trivium) King V KV7, hers the Chris Broderick (ex-Megadeth) Pro Series Soloist HT6 — and it was that night that he mentioned the band had just become Jackson endorsers.
On 26 June 2023 Frozen Crown announced a worldwide contract with Napalm Records. The band's own explanation was blunt: they had run everything themselves, DIY and with a very small entourage, until they grew to a point where they could no longer handle it alone. Napalm's senior A&R Sebastian Muench called them one of the most creative power metal bands to have emerged in the last five years. At the point of signing they were still a five-piece.
On 5 September 2023 the band announced Alessia Lanzone as a permanent sixth member and third guitarist. She was seventeen — the same age Niso Tomasini had been when he joined — and would share lead and rhythm guitar duties with Sheena and Federico both live and in the studio. Her first show came eleven days later, on 16 September, in Tuttlingen, Germany, supporting U.D.O.
Until the announcement she was kept out of sight. Mondelli told Metal Hammer Germany that this was not always easy: whenever the band posted selfies from the rehearsal room, she always had to stay in the background.
For her first show Lanzone wrote arrangements that do not exist on the records. Nothing on The Fallen King or Crowned in Frost has parts that call for a third guitar; to play those songs with three anyway, Mondelli says, she wrote additional parts to fill them out.
Mondelli says he is often asked about recruiting young players, and gives a reason. Plenty of bands consider established musicians more reliable; his does not share that view. What they want is colleagues with enough time for Frozen Crown, and that matters to them more than a lot of experience. He adds that he would have been very glad of someone taking him by the hand when he was starting out himself.
No auditions were held for the third guitar chair. By Mondelli's account Alessia Lanzone had been a fan for years and had been sending them Instagram videos of herself playing their songs — and she lives a few kilometres away. When the March 2023 Call of the North touring exposed how much of the studio guitar work could not be reproduced on stage, they chose her directly, without deliberation.
For Lanzone the job was a series of firsts. She told Guitar World that before Frozen Crown she had only played covers in a local band, had never toured and had never written songs.
The fifth album's title pays homage to Children Of Bodom. Napalm's press text names that band as the inspiration behind Frozen Crown's youthful, raw and passionate approach to metal, and presents War Hearts as the first album made as a six-piece and the first on which every member appears on the recording.
The ninth track, "King Of The Sky", is less a song than a device. Mondelli explains that it is the prelude to the closing "Ice Dragon", split off because joining the two would have made one song too long — and because listeners skip intros. Given its own track number, it does not get skipped.
The seventh track, "Bloodlines", has more than one source behind it. Napalm's press text credits the Vampire: The Masquerade series of board and video games; Mondelli himself has said in an interview that the song draws not only on that but on Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver and on the 1987 film The Lost Boys — the film being, he says, where the track's eighties-style synth sound comes from.
The videos were shot at Italian castles. The first single, "Steel And Gold", was filmed at the Castello dei Doria in Dolceacqua, Liguria; the title track was shot among the ruins of the castle at Avigliana, and the band say it was made with no post-production at all. "Steel And Gold", they add, is a song about loyalty, integrity and self-improvement.
The band's first American appearance was not a support tour but a festival: ProgPower USA 2024, on 7 September 2024 at Center Stage in Atlanta, Georgia. Mondelli later said they could go in that way because most of the crowd already knew them.
On 16 May 2025 Fabiola "Sheena" Bellomo's departure was announced. Her own statement described the split as totally amicable and peacefully agreed by both parties, and gave her reasons: mounting duties had stopped her focusing on her own projects and life, and she wanted to work in different musical styles. The band's reply noted that she had been with them for three albums, called it "not a farewell, but a goodbye", and confirmed every scheduled show would go ahead.
Her replacement was announced four days later, on 20 May 2025: Alexandra Lioness, whose actual name is Aleksandra Stamenkovic. She leads the Serbian band Jenner — its leader, songwriter, vocalist and lead guitarist — and has also worked as a videomaker, producer and manager. Two names for one person is why both turn up in print: Lioness is the stage name, while the credits Napalm published in 2026 use the legal one.
Interviewed in Tokyo, Aleksandra Stamenkovic named Megadeth's Dave Mustaine and Jody Turner of the British band Rock Goddess as her heroes. Turner is why she started singing, she said: her own band is a trio like Turner's, and she began as a guitarist only. At the same table Alessia Lanzone named Dream Theater's John Petrucci as her guitar hero, and said she picked the instrument up after happening to see a video of a girl playing and thinking that if a girl could, so could she.
Stamenkovic was not first approached in 2025. Mondelli told BURRN! that he had contacted her back in 2020 — before the replacement members of that period had even been chosen. Locked down and unable to travel, he reasoned that if the album had to be made remotely then nobody's home country mattered, so he might as well pick the best player. He happened across an EP by her band Jenner, looked up the video for its new song on YouTube, and concluded she would fit Frozen Crown perfectly. Label matters and a rushed record meant it did not happen then; the moment came round five years later.
For this record the visual side carries named outside hands. The cover art was hand-painted by Sheila Franco; the videos and band photographs are by Raoul Noise; and the throne, along with the physical "frozen crown" prop itself, was designed and built by Daria Gislon. For a band that had run its own sleeves and clips almost entirely in-house, this is the album with the widest circle around it.
The first single, "The One", appeared in June 2026. In the band's telling it is where Giada Etro turns heel: she claims the throne and the literal frozen crown and leads the wraith kings in their search for The One. Since the debut she had played the side that fights; this reverses it. The second single, "Reborn", followed on 28 July, and drummer Niso Tomasini describes it as continuing the arc "The One" began.
Giada Etro names Floor Jansen as her absolute idol, and she has actually taken singing lessons from her. The method was disarmingly simple: she wrote Jansen an email, got a reply, and travelled to the Netherlands for the lessons. The dating she gives for the trip does not hold together within the source, so no year is stated here.
When Frozen Crown supported Elvenking on a European tour in 2019, it was not a new acquaintance. Giada Etro says she had sung backing vocals on Elvenking's older albums some fifteen years earlier; the two bands live in roughly the same part of Italy and have known each other that long.
Mondelli has put numbers on how thickly the band records. By his reckoning a Frozen Crown song carries at least ten guitar layers at any moment — four rhythm tracks, two to four leads and two more for solos — and the fewest they ever used was two. Going to three guitarists on stage was how they chose to carry that stack without leaning on backing tracks.
The three guitars have fixed jobs. Mondelli plays the lower rhythm part on a seven-string while the other two play the same riffs an octave up; he leaves the twin leads to them because he is singing at the same time; and each guitarist plays whichever solo she or he recorded in the studio.
Mondelli traces his habit of writing fast songs to one track: Yngwie Malmsteen's "Never Die". In a piece written in his own words he calls it the sole reason he is obsessed with writing fast songs with high-pitched vocals and neo-classical riffs — and in the same piece he admits that the "No, no!" in Frozen Crown's "Far Beyond" was consciously lifted from "I'll See The Light Tonight".
The man who leads a power metal band did not start there. The first real band Mondelli put together, at about fourteen, played melodic death metal heavily marked by early Anathema, My Dying Bride and Novembre. He screamed from the outset, stopped doing it entirely at twenty, and took it up again for Frozen Crown.
For the band's first lead guitarist this was not native ground. In an interview around the debut Thalia Bellazecca said power metal was not her main genre — she had always played thrash and heavy metal — and that she felt slightly hemmed in on stage, because power metal is built mostly out of rhythm parts rather than the shredding she was used to.
Where this band is from does not settle into one answer. Press material and the international media routinely call them a Milan band, but Mondelli said in a 2024 interview that the members all live in Veneto and Friuli, with drummer Niso Tomasini some two and a half hours away and Alessia Lanzone five minutes away. In another interview the year before he had said four fifths of the band lived between Veneto and Friuli, so even his own count moves. He himself is from Puglia, in the south.