Elias Rønnenfelt’s solo work broke open the dance dam. Heavy Glory, the singer’s debut album under his own name, found him skewing toward folk and Americana, eschewing his typical snarl for soft sweetness. Shortly after writing the material for that record, Rønnenfelt was ready to go in a different direction. Having indulged his newfound talents for balladry, he rounded up his Iceage bandmates for their leanest, meanest record in over a decade. Miraculously, it also happens to be the most danceable entry in the Danes’ catalog.
For Love of Grace & the Hereafter harkens back to Iceage’s early days as teenage punks, but the band demonstrates how much it’s matured in the time since by suffusing that gritty aggression with sunny melodies and syncopated rhythms. It recalls the kinetic energy of their first two records but possesses the sophistication of their more recent output. Equal parts jangly and muscular, the five-piece forge a new path while staying true to their roots. A “back-to-basics” record would feel like a trite maneuver in less capable hands, like a method of reeling in old fans after a string of disappointments, but Iceage pulls it off with style—both because the band has yet to release a disappointing album, and because they revisit those basics in a fresh, compelling way. Never does it scan as facile nostalgia.
The band produced and mixed For Love of Grace alongside their longtime collaborator Nis Bysted, and they recorded all twelve songs at Silence Studio in remote Koppom, Sweden. Notably, this is the first time they’ve tracked at the same recording studio more than once; their first visit was to make 2014’s Plowing Into The Field Of Love. If it was a conscious decision to reignite that early 2010s spark, then it seems to have paid off handsomely. Plowing famously marked Iceage’s shift away from outright punk to encompass a wider sonic palette, their gaze firmly fixed on the future. This time, though, Iceage is here on retrospective, poetic terms, sharpening the edges they smoothed over in this very spot.
“Ember,” For Love of Grace’s fittingly fiery opener, exudes the adrenaline rush of a band playing live in a room. The tempo ever so subtly pushes and pulls like a living, breathing organism, thanks to the dialed-in focus of Iceage’s rhythm section: drummer Dan Kjær Nielsen and bassist Jakob Tvilling Pless. Guitars ricochet around the mix like convulsive racquetballs, and Rønnenfelt’s menacing narrator sings about how they “love you in an ominous way.” That dark glee follows us to “Match Head Girl,” whose insistent, rhythmic “do-do-dos” sound like ad-libs from a cartoonishly cheerful supervillain. Nielsen, Pless, and guitarists Johan Surrballe Wieth and Casper Morilla produce a playful jangle like an infant toying with car keys. But Rønnenfelt’s protagonist takes that free-spirited abandon to a perilous precipice: “You’re a match-head / Make the world combust / With every strike!”
“The Weak” channels the upbeat grime of CBGB and Max’s Kansas City mainstays like the Ramones and New York Dolls. It strikes a balance between poppy earworms and bristly distortion with handclaps, thunderous toms, I-IV-V power chords, and a pennywhistle solo that’s just off-key enough to sound like the most fucked up thing you’ve heard in a while. “Holy Water” likewise pays heed to new wave bona fides through its brisk, pop-leaning beat and snaking guitar line. Meanwhile, the jaunty, double-time swing of centerpiece “mother-of-pearl” sounds like what would happen if the Strokes—or even Jet, for that matter—decided to get a little post-punk with it. The lively bounce of “Salve for Every Sore” disguises its true identity as a brutally grim love song, masking lines like “Light up from the lingering / Maggot hidden in the apple” with rollicking snares, booming crash cymbals, and anthemic guitars.
Then there’s “Star,” another dark love song rendered in pure Iceage fashion. Rønnenfelt implores the object of his affection to “flood me like a tempest in drought.” “Every inch of my earth and sky / You can occupy / Cover me entirely,” he sings, the submissive yearning laid on extra thick. When the tightly wound grooves burst at the seams in the outro, he confesses once more that “you’ve got me dying like a staaaaaarrrr,” and everything combusts like a sparkling supernova. It’s this particular moment that best encapsulates what makes For Love of Grace & the Hereafter such a riveting, dizzying experience: Iceage makes annihilation sound like a bacchanal. [Mexican Summer]
Grant Sharples is a writer, journalist, and critic. His work has also appeared in Interview, Uproxx, Pitchfork, Stereogum, The Ringer, NME, and other publications. He lives in Kansas City. You can follow him everywhere @grantsharpies.
