B-Side Guys

Saint Avangeline shot the video for her Madonna cover in the Mojave Desert—the same location where the original “Frozen” was filmed in 1998. It’s a bold choice that could’ve felt like cosplay, but the Atlanta-based artist uses the geographical echo as a starting point rather than a destination. Where Madonna’s version was all dramatic gestures and gothic mysticism, Saint Avangeline strips the track down to its skeletal vulnerability, letting her ethereal vocals drift through the production like smoke through abandoned rooms.

The arrangement pulls the song into dream pop territory without erasing its original DNA. Saint Avangeline has built a career on haunting reimaginings—her 2023 cover of the unreleased Lana Del Rey track “Every Man Gets His Wish” (which she retitled “Every Girl Gets Her Wish”) gained over 13 million streams by understanding how to make borrowed material feel like confession. Here, she applies the same instinct: the cinematic scope remains, but the temperature drops. The production hovers in that strange space between reverence and reinvention, where covering an icon’s work becomes a conversation across decades rather than imitation.

What’s striking is how Saint Avangeline’s queerness reframes the material. Noir magazine wrote that through her music, she “is sanctifying the queer experience—not as rebellion, but as resurrection,” and you can hear that philosophy at work. The cover doesn’t announce itself as reclamation; it simply exists as if this version was always waiting in the original’s shadow. With 79.63 million total streams on Spotify and a fanbase that found her through the darkness of tracks like “Lilith,” she’s proven there’s an audience hungry for pop music filtered through melancholy and longing.

The Mojave returns in the video not as pilgrimage site but as the place where two versions of the same song meet—separated by twenty-seven years, connected by the understanding that some emotions stay frozen regardless of who’s singing them.