Iceage - Scalding Ice from Denmark

Four rebels without a cause, with the look of hoodlums and the fringes of decadent dandies. Brash enough to carve out a space in a Copenhagen scene whose very name was a statement of intent: "New Way Of Danish Fuck You" (a melting pot from which several of their side projects would also emerge, like Sexdrome and Marching Church). And yet for Elias Bender Rønnenfelt (singer and guitarist), Johan Surrballe Wieth (guitar), Jakob Tvilling Pless (bass) and Dan Kjær Nielsen (drums), getting noticed wasn't easy, despite a punk sound as raw and brutal as it was expressive, capable of fusing genuine "post" leanings (more Warsaw than Joy Division, really) with hardcore fury, free of any revivalist posturing. The blame lies with a phenomenon called "post-punk revival" that infected half of Europe, forcing fans to carefully sift the wheat from the chaff (that is, the bands of real worth from the swarm of talentless copyists).

From the very start, though, it was clear that lurking within Iceage's toxic, decadent sonic mixture were the seeds of a creativity capable of tearing down fences and handling even unpredictable metamorphoses. Listening to them at their debut and then grappling with their latest work, you can sense how far they've come, yet never get the feeling you're dealing with two different bands: the core elements of their music remain unchanged, but are now all finally in the right place. The hardcore-punk of their debut has gradually transformed into a molten post-punk of dramatic, refined tones, suggesting a bright future full of interesting developments for Elias & co.

The New Brigade

Barely out of their teens, Iceage already enjoyed a solid reputation as a live act in Copenhagen's underground clubs by the time they released their debut album New Brigade (2011). Word of mouth above all drove the first pressing to sell out, also earning the band the chance to play a string of dates across Europe.

The record is a short sequence of 12 jagged, disorienting shards: twenty-five minutes of genius and recklessness in which these determined newcomers conjure up a striking example of postmodern punk, steeped in a pronounced dark feeling.

A brief ambient/noise fragment introduces us to "White Rune", a track that immediately gives a clear sense of the album's stylistic direction, with its crooked post-punk opening and the chaos stirred up by the guitars. An apathetic, hypnotic voice and the catchy rhythms dictated by the throbbing bass round out a sound that's hard to remain indifferent to, such is the immediacy and energy it radiates; the track echoes early Killing Joke, but in a decidedly bastardized and sped-up form.

The title track "New Brigade", for which a hallucinatory video was also shot, immediately establishes itself as a bizarre yet spot-on hybrid of punk and extreme (Nordic-style) metal, personalized with a vocal that's both distant and powerful, towering over two minutes of essential rock; a track that, like the previous one, proves very gripping from the first listen.

On tracks like "Remember" and "Total Drench", Joy Division/Warsaw are reread through the lens of hardcore fury, giving rise to two excellent, scarred post-punk episodes; "Rotting Heights" opens as a tribute to the Bauhaus of "In The Flat Field" but quickly mutates into another outburst of just over a minute and a half, blisteringly fast and repeatedly broken up by the band's trademark stop-and-go dynamics. "Broken Bone" boasts a rather peculiar structure, with no-wave touches serving catchy choruses, much as happens on the following "Collapse" and the furious "Eyes", which confirm how these various reference points are transcended to create something new and extremely direct.

The closest parallels to hardcore punk come on "Count Me In", which barely clears the one-minute mark, while "Never Return" is, by contrast, the "longest" track, with three minutes of syncopated sounds and the singer intoning over an obsessive, graceless backdrop, a genuine punk loop. The influence of Crisis emerges, and on the closing "You're Blessed" the band speeds up and decontextualizes its own influences without losing the catchy, misleading melodies that run through the album's scant twenty-five minutes. An excellent blend of dark post-punk and hardcore fury, absorbing the outbursts of four teenagers forever balanced between rage and icy apathy.

Landing in America

The debut of these four Danish enfants terribles didn't go unnoticed on the indie circuit (including on these very pages, where it was immediately flagged with an enthusiastic review). It was also reissued in the United States, enabling the band's first tour across the pond, kicked off with a vigorous performance in Brooklyn, New York in 2013. From Copenhagen's small underground clubs to the "front pages" of the global web: even in our age, with Warholian "fifteen minutes of fame" within everyone's reach, a leap like that is hard to ignore. Matador Records wasted no time and signed them for the follow-up, You're Nothing (2013).

The debut album's strengths included the ability to balance its ingredients with absolute coherence and spontaneity, managing to define a style steeped in influences yet, at the same time, personal and instantly recognizable. A balance that doesn't waver in its follow-up, but rather takes on new and fascinating shades.

"Ecstasy" opens the album: a thunderous start, marked by roaring guitars and booming rhythms; Elias Bender Rønnenfelt's voice is now tinged with an unprecedented bitterness, with notes of melancholy absent in the past: a pain full of rage, which seeps into and charges the Danes' chaotic, violent hardcore-punk with excitement.

Iceage, in fact, keep hitting hard: tracks like "Coalition" or "Everything Drifts" are dark-punk broadsides that land squarely in the listener's face; the riffs are aggressive and dark, but never lose sight of melody, in the spirit of the best Rikk Agnew.

"Morals" is the album's surprise: it's actually an original reinterpretation of "L'ultima occasione", the song made famous by Mina in 1965; certainly not easy material for a punk band to handle, but the band manages to combine the original's lyrical tension with their violent stop-and-go dynamics in a remarkably natural way. On the opposite end, there's a track like "It Might Hit First", a violent, dissonant noise-rock piece through which all of Iceage's passion for the most extreme sounds filters through. The finale, entrusted to the title track, is as energetic and moving as the opening seconds of "Ecstasy".

A rather lo-fi production amplifies both the rawness and the expressive power of an album that, despite its twelve tracks, doesn't even reach half an hour in length and never flags for a moment. New shadows thus brush against Iceage's impetuousness; the result is a record that complements the debut, with the Danish band widening its scope, adopting a broader expressiveness both vocally and sonically, with the rage and drive of their early days more present than ever, though now infused with a bitter melancholy. Sincere and ferocious, Iceage's torments prove to be both deeply personal and universal.

You're Nothing wins over many a dark heart and consolidates the Danish band's stature, by now fully seasoned and at ease even in a live setting. The fame earned with their early recordings brings considerable media exposure, with extensive coverage on the leading webzines and several tours, including overseas. Meanwhile, back in their native Denmark, the infamous "New Way Of Danish Fuck You" has fully blossomed, a microcosm — which, as mentioned, also includes some of Iceage's own side projects — that has spawned noisy post-punk outfits (Sexdrome, Marching Church), as well as acts devoted to a skewed, "pop" strain of electronic music (the "supergroup" Vår). Among the movement's offshoots are also some bands that tone down the initial ferocity of the Scandinavian sound, opting for more introspective, melodic formulas: like Lower, Communions, or the dark-rockers Hand Of Dust, who seem to have taken the Gun Club's lesson to heart. Iceage's third album would also abandon the rawness of their early work in favor of new, overall more "accessible" sounds.

Announced at the last minute, but preceded by no fewer than four singles, Plowing Into The Field Of Love (2014) marks yet another significant turning point in the journey of the four Copenhagen hooligans.

The shift is already evident on the opening "On My Fingers": Elias Bender Rønnenfelt's voice takes on the traits of a passionate crooner, while the keys of a mournful piano provide counterpoint, crafting a track with a noble, languid gait. The Iceage frontman almost seems to have become a new Nick Cave: we find him in this new guise tackling epic crescendos ("How Many", "GlassyEyed, Dormant And Veiled") and noir ballads like "Stay" and "Forever", among the album's most successful moments, with their twilight-western atmospheres.

Elsewhere, Iceage reinvent themselves as garage-rockers with country leanings: following in the footsteps of Gun Club ("The Lord's Favorite"), but also of the Pogues ("Abundant Living"), tracks in which the Danes sound rather uninspired, somewhat "ordinary", making one wonder about the reasons behind such a change of course, especially given such an exhilarating start to their career.

The finale, entrusted to the melancholic title track, is reached through rather impersonal passages, such as the Cave-esque "Cimmerian Shade" or the lopsided post-punk of "Simony": the sound is certainly not lacking, between horns, strings and the aforementioned piano (not to mention, of course, the usual "rock" section, though less prominent than usual), but the overall blend doesn't entirely convince. The same feeling one gets looking at the cover, assembled at the last moment with whatever the band had lying around: a sense of incompleteness, which clashes sharply with the tried-and-tested formula of early Iceage: the spontaneous fury of tracks like "White Rune" or "Everything Drifts" now feels like a distant memory, replaced by a wavering mood, perhaps the result of indecision over which direction to take.

Credit must certainly be given to Iceage for daring to try something different, but their ambition to broaden their sound seems to have led to the proverbial case of biting off more than they could chew. Plowing Into The Field Of Love is therefore an uneven work, in which a few potential new "classics" (the opener, in particular, delivers more than one chill) are matched by several moments lacking in character. A step backward, in short, that puts Iceage at a crossroads, at the most delicate point of their career so far. It will fall to the "test" of their fourth album to prove the real level of their songwriting, and thus their true substance.

Music is pure emotion, the intense emotions of youth — anger, sadness, contempt, desire — as well as energy and sex, Iceage possess and deliver all of these things with grace, offering solace to their followers amid all the confusion of our times

(Richard Hell)

No limits

But Elias Bender Rønnenfelt and his bandmates don't need to be told twice. Well aware of their worth, brash and daring just the right amount, the former Copenhagen punksters return with a new work whose title alone reveals its ambitions: Beyondless. And theirs proves to be a truly no limits brand of rock, more structured and mature than the hallucinated shards of their early days. The days of the "New Way Of Danish Fuck You" scene are now long gone, though the influence of such a prolific scene as that of 2010s Copenhagen remains — an intriguing breeding ground where, at the same time, the experimental, noise-tinged electronic music of Posh Isolation was also forcefully emerging. One need only listen, in this regard, to Rønnenfelt's own experiments, alongside Loke Rahbek (Sexdrome, Lust For Youth), Kristian Emdal (Lower, Age Coin) and Lukas Højland (Red Flesh, Pagan Youth), all united under the name Vår, to realize just how effortlessly all boundaries between genres had been torn down.

Beyondless (2018), in particular, draws on the experience with Marching Church and picks up where Plowing Into The Field Of Love left off, but attempts a leap forward that comes off as a full success, even earning the endorsement of a father figure of American punk, the Richard Hell of "Blank Generation": "I identify completely with their music," Hell has said. "They're like a little urban gang, loyal to one another, wary of outsiders (of whom music journalists like myself are the most suspect examples), but at the same time they seem mature and capable. Not only do they play and write well, but the production of their records, even at their most chaotic moments, is impeccable."

Indeed, the new album rediscovers a "proto"-punk sensibility (more than a "post"-punk one) that brings to mind Cave's "Kicking Against The Pricks", when with the Bad Seeds he reinterpreted the classics of the American rock tradition in his own way. On top of all this, there's the youthful recklessness of twenty-somethings who know where they want to go and have the ability to get there.

A good deal of the album revolves around the track "Catch It". It's as if Cave were covering the Stooges: a track full of dark, seductive melancholy and ritualistic brashness. Rønnenfelt, slipping into the role of the doomed rocker, sings “You want it, you want it, you want it again/ Why don’t you come and ask me?/ I adore you, my friend”. The track finds its counterpart in "Take It All", where the influence of the Bad Seeds of "Your Funeral... My Trial" emerges.

Also standing out is the excellent "Pain Killer", which features the voice of actress and singer Sky Ferreira, who has recently also entered the pantheon of David Lynch. Here, Iceage are caught up in a whirlwind of '70s suggestions, somewhat in the vein of Johnny Thunders, telling us of wrecked lives and mutually dependent relationships that will probably never find redemption under the sun: "Praying at the altar of your legs and feet/ Your saliva is a drug so bittersweet/ I'll arrogate what's there to take/ In an evanescent embrace… You became my pain killer/ I rue the day/ Alright, alright, alright".

There's also no shortage of dives into a hallucinated, ramshackle rock, as in "The Day The Music Dies", where any sense of time is lost and an alcoholic drift emerges in which "The future's never starting/ The present never ends".

As mentioned, Iceage at times also seem to look to the latest Marching Church. Just listen to the atmospheres of "Plead The Fifth" and the bizarre, cabaret-tinged, surreal pop-noir-jazz of "Showtime".

Fans of the Danish band's early records will probably notice the change, even though the opening track "Hurrah" throws a bridge back to the rough post-punk of their beginnings, albeit in a less "lo-fi" dimension. On the title track that closes the album, we find a path toward glimpsing a new landscape, forcefully bringing forth a kind of catharsis of adolescent punk fervor.

Beyondless thus proves to be a great comeback for a band still capable of catching the listener off guard and building a sound that remains personal and recognizable, helped no doubt by the undeniable charisma of their unrivaled frontman, Elias Bender Rønnenfelt, who certainly doesn't lack the physique du rôle.

A new shelter

Buoyed by the redemption of their fourth album, which dispelled any remaining doubts about their true worth, Iceage bring about another small revolution, marking their move from Matador to Mexican Summer, as well as the arrival of a new member: guitarist Casper Morilla Fernandez. The result is what still stands today as arguably their absolute peak: Seek Shelter (2021), also their first record to make use of outside production, entrusted to Peter Kember, better known as Sonic Boom. A name that evokes psychedelic suggestions with a strong space-rock flavor.

The Danish outfit has by now shed its status as a mere cult band, and the hardcore-punk of their early days has turned into a magmatic post-punk with dramatic, refined shades. Alongside this musical evolution has come a sharper social and political awareness: not only did the band promptly clear up some misreadings of certain symbolism used in their early days, which had drawn accusations of fascism and racism, but they have also taken a stand against certain reckless political decisions that, in Denmark, are forcing non-white populations to live in actual ghettos.

Across the album's nine tracks, recorded in Lisbon, nihilism has given way to awareness. The cracks carved into the post-punk body by gothic and fuzz-pop influences have opened the door to further stylistic mutations, which have not, however, sacrificed Iceage's wild spirit. Proof of this is the lead single, "The Holding Hand", a filthy, sickly rock-noir number that brings out the new project's more apocalyptic tone, scratching away with an unsettling noise-goth edge and a quavering vocal timbre. With the following single, "Vendetta", Iceage do violence to the iconic punk-rock image, delivering an overwhelming madchester-style dance-rock that, besides making Shaun Ryder pale by comparison, revives the erotic tensions of Primal Scream's "Screamadelica", while tackling the issue of Western culture's despotic drift. At this point, confusion and excitement have paved the way for one of the boldest and potentially most iconic singles of modern times, "Shelter Song". A liturgy built from post-punk, spirituals and britpop, fed by a breathtaking string section and gospel choir.

"Seek Shelter" can at this point certainly count among the Danish band's most powerful songs, yet it's hard to single out any of the nine tracks as a lesser one. The incandescent ballad "Love Kills Slowly" burns with pathos, a passionate lyrical-apocalyptic spiral in the vein of Nick Cave. The wordy, Bruce Springsteen/Lou Reed-style poetics of "Gold City" come as a surprise. And the band loses none of its edge when it plunges headlong into more conventional rock territory with "The Wilder Powder Blue", or digs up the gutsier impulses of early Oasis on "Dear Saint Cecilia".

The Mc5/Stooges-style fury animating "High & Hurt" is tempered by a psych-rock attitude and a clever nod to "Will The Circle Be Unbroken", the popular Christian hymn from the early 1900s, with bass and drums overwhelming the senses and the Fall's irreverence peeking through. The Danes' final challenge is the playful, oddball "Drink Rain", which with a rich sequence of chords confuses Irving Berlin with Vic Godard, scratching even deeper into the goth-rock vein that has always charted the band's creative course. Adding further allure is the contribution — featured on two tracks — of the Lisboa Gospel Collective, the Portuguese gospel choir that joined Elias and co. in the studio in Lisbon.

Another piece of good news is the songwriting, the true deciding factor between Iceage and other contemporary bands. All of this adds up to a genuine jolt of energy, one that sounds like a sign of emotional and creative rebirth — and it deserves all the more attention in a historical moment saturated with murky outpourings of gloomy mood.

What also sets Iceage apart from the swarm of post-punk imitators is the sophistication of their cultural background. As an enthusiastic Richard Hell has noted, “in Rønnenfelt's interviews, you can catch references to Carson McCullers (‘The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter’), Georges Bataille (‘Story of the Eye’), Peter Shaffer (‘Equus’), Yukio Mishima (‘The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea’), Jean Genet (‘Thief's Journal and Miracle of the Rose’), Octave Mirbeau (‘The Torture Garden’), Henry Miller (‘On Writing’), James Agee (‘A Death in the Family’). And there's nothing showy about it, it's just pure, free-ranging knowledge.” A precious substrate accompanied by a theatrical flair worthy of the wildest Cave, even if Elias is quick to point out that “what people see at the shows isn't a character, it's not fiction, it's more an exaggeration of myself, an extension of who I am in life” (Rolling Stone, 2021).

The challenge, in short, never lets up, under the motto “always evolve, never surrender.” As we await their next moves, Iceage's ice keeps burning with passion.

Now on their sixth album, with For Love Of Grace & The Hereafter (2026) Elias Rønnenfelt and co. aren't losing any sleep over it, and keep folding new elements into their shifting, decadent post-punk recipe. If the new ingredient on the previous Seek Shelter (now five years old) was a baggy/Madchester sound, still present here on the pulsing, swaggering “Star,” this time the novelty comes in the form of wild rockabilly flourishes and playful nods to alt-country.

After “Ember,” a trailblazer burning with passion that, together with the expressionist cover art depicting a kiss, introduces the album's romantic themes, the xylophones and du-du-dus of “Match Head Girl” reveal healthy doses of Violent Femmes and Weezer, while “The Weak” leans heavily on psychobilly, especially in a delightful middle section fueled by handclaps and out-of-tune flutes.

The Danes turn instead to Albion on “No Fear”: they do so with a great bassline (actually, Jakob Tvilling Pless's work is terrific throughout), delicate acoustic-guitar strumming and a lopsided yet hymn-like chorus. Even though these are post-punk songs, Iceage's attention to detail is as remarkable as ever, and their choices are simple but effective, as with the keyboards on the unhinged “Holy Wather” or the string arrangements that lend a sinister tone to the closing “True Blue.”

As usual, Iceage won't draw huge crowds, but the real losers are, essentially, those who stay away — missing out once again on the work of a formidable, versatile, engrossing band that has nothing to envy in any of its Anglo-Irish counterparts… quite the opposite, in fact.

Contributions by Marco De Baptistis (“Beyondless”), Gianfranco Marmoro (“Seek Shelter”), Michele Corrado (“For Love Of Grace & The Hereafter”)

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