Historically, punk has been a young person’s game. When they issued their galvanizing debut, New Brigade, in 2011, the members of Iceage were still teenagers, concerned with capturing the volatile energy of their sometimes-bloody live shows. There was no room for draggy runtimes or studio accoutrements; as guitarist Johan Suurballe Wieth recently recalled, “We were very adamant … that there could be no overdubs.”
But Iceage’s secret is that they only got better when they began to slow the tempos, accept that overdubs wouldn’t snatch their souls, and remold their energy into a more brooding goth-rock grandeur. That evolution began on 2014’s Plowing Into the Field of Love and reached a culmination on 2021’s Seek Shelter, which welcomed Madchester grooves and gospel choirs into the group’s once austere sensibility.
Iceage continue their winning streak on For Love of Grace & the Hereafter, an exhilarating album where romance and violence fuse into a feverish blur. The first Iceage album in five years, For Love of Grace is somewhat of a reset. The band returned to the tiny studio in the Swedish countryside where they recorded Plowing with no outside producers; they banged out the basic tracks in a week. “This was not a question of going into the studio and going on an expensive journey of discovering a sound,” frontman Elias Bender Rønnenfelt told So Young. “We just wanted to take what was in the rehearsal space and cut it to tape. It needed to be very raw.”
Rather than return to the hardcore of early Iceage, For Love of Grace does something better: harnessing the immediacy of those records in service of pastoral punk, swooning hooks, and a wild-eyed romantic fervor. Rønnenfelt is in stellar form as a singer, channeling a melodic richness that once seemed beyond his range, whether he’s scat-singing over the opening eruptions of the lovesick “Match Head Girl” or crooning about a love that makes him feel like a dying star on the jangly headrush of “Star.” At times, he sounds like a Scandinavian Paul Westerberg, hopped up on red, red wine: He doesn’t hit all the high notes, but he summons feelings bigger and brighter than his octave range.
Maybe Rønnenfelt was energized by the Americana flourishes on his recent solo albums, or maybe it’s a side effect of recording in rural Sweden, where elk and roe deer are in higher supply than vocal processors. “The Weak” is all ripping rockabilly and cowpunk clatter, with twangy guitars that mimic banjos and an ear-piercing recorder solo. (A happy accident after Rønnenfelt found a recorder and tin whistle at the studio and decided to put both in his mouth at the same time.) “Salve for Every Sore” is a breathless reverie whose strings and folk-punk rhythms bring a sense of tenderness to Iceage’s tumult. “My little darling/I get the impression you’re a salve for every sore,” Rønnenfelt croons, punctuating his longing with a Springsteen-ian Whoah-oh-oh.
Rønnenfelt used to write about violence and inner turmoil, but now he gravitates towards romance. But what’s the difference, really? In Iceage’s world, love is a violent force, pulverizing our insides and pulling us towards certain doom. “I love you in an ominous way,” he sings a minute into the opening “Ember”—emphasis on ominous, not love—and the album more than fulfills that prophecy. On “Star,” his lover covers him, consumes him, floods him “like a tempest in drought”; on “No Fear,” “She drinks my all and all/And bites my face and rips the bandaid.” Rønnenfelt has a flair for tormented imagery and religious iconography. The mangled blues of “True Blue” may be the first song since Bowling for Soup’s “1985” to rhyme nirvana with Madonna, but I’m willing to wager that Rønnenfelt is talking about neither the grunge band nor the pop star.
Since 2014, Iceage has frequently drawn comparisons to fellow overseas idolizers of American rock mythology, Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds. But if For Love of Grace were a Cave album, I think it would be Henry’s Dream, the one where Cave wrote songs that were as suited to a Brazilian street festival as a Berlin goth club. Early ’90s Cave is what came to mind when I first heard “Ember,” with its acoustic flourishes and mile-a-minute rush of sordid imagery. “I caught you like an ember,” Rønnenfelt intones repeatedly, his voice grave and determined. As he often does, the singer frames romance as a gamble with catastrophe (“Are you willing to pay/Are you willing to break/With all that’s lain before you?”) and darkness. But throughout this album, he also lets some light in. It emanates from those flickering embers and dying stars, and reminds us that pleasure and promise can torment you just as much as pain.
