Iceage have found joy

In March 2007, Danish special forces were dropped by a military helicopter onto the roof of the Ungdomshuset in Nørrebro to clear out what had been the heart of Copenhagen’s youth counterculture for twenty-five years. It was the largest police operation in Denmark since the Nazi occupation. Elias Bender Rønnenfelt had been going there since he was twelve: it was the place where he’d drunk his first beers, where a boy wearing lipstick could walk in without risking a beating. He was fifteen when barricades sprang up across the neighbourhood. The following year, in 2008, Rønnenfelt founded Iceage with his schoolmates Johan Suurballe Wieth, Dan Kjær Nielsen and Jakob Tvilling Pless. They were seventeen. That same tension – something on the verge of breaking that needs to be held together – found its way into their music right from the start: bursts of hardcore, gothic post-punk, that sense of menace that Iggy Pop would sense when he described the band as ‘the only punk band around today that sounds truly dangerous’. Over eighteen years and six albums – with the addition of guitarist Casper Morilla Fernandez – Iceage have never strayed from their fundamental principle: setting a collapse to music in search of hope.

“For Love of Grace & the Hereafter” stems from a return to the past. Twelve years ago, the band recorded “Plowing into the Field of Love” at Silence Studio, a country house in rural Sweden near the Norwegian border. The choice stemmed from a desire to capture a specific tension – that energy which builds up and needs to be released. The lyrics were deliberately written in the weeks immediately leading up to the recording, to keep alive a sense of risk and spontaneity. In the studio, the band worked with producer Nis Bysted, stripping everything down to the bare essentials with minimal overdubs. The result is a twelve-track album that is, at once, the most polished and the most physical of their career: polished on the surface, chaotic at its core. Once again, Iceage infuse their post-punk with diverse influences, just as they did in grand style on the masterpiece *Plowing into the Field of Love* and the less successful *Seek Shelter*.

It is perhaps in this balance between the abyss and nature that the singer’s creativity reaches its peak, as is evident in Iceage’s first single in five years. ‘Star’ tells of a love that makes you feel like a dying star, set to a prominent bassline, restless guitars, handclaps and an enveloping melody. The band has always had this pop sensibility right from the start, as well as a knack for blending different elements, such as the glockenspiel that heralds the ride that is “Ember”, heedless of a biting chorus: “I love you in a disturbing way”. This impetuous character is evident right from the opening track “The Weak”, recorded live and set against “a whole city of hopes and shattered dreams”, where drum rolls blend with pounding guitars, clapping, disjointed whistles, wailing flutes. It is precisely this euphoria that is the hallmark of an album which, at times, is reminiscent of Wire, whilst at others veers towards acoustic moments.