Reviews

Iceage – For Love of Grace & the Hereafter

The Danish art-punk veterans deliver their most approachable, yet distinctly odd, album to date.

Ever since the release of Beyondless in 2018, Iceage have continued to explore new ways to diversify their post-punk leanings with an increasingly lighter touch. The Danish five-piece move at their own pace, evolving freely without chasing trends, fully aware that they might fail spectacularly. It’s never been just about making art, but about inhabiting it truthfully. And, just as importantly, looking the part while doing so.

Fifteen years removed from storming out of the gates with their debut LP, New Brigade, For Love of Grace & the Hereafter aims to recapture some of the scrappy, chaotic energy that defined their early years. That reasoning reveals itself in the wild creative swings they take. This is, after all, a band that has kept a clear identity—that of keeping the music melodic to its core—despite switching gears with ease.

The shifts Iceage takes across the album can feel jarring at first, though pleasantly so. If there’s anything that glues these songs together, it’s their ability to invite rather than intimidate. Upbeat handclaps and glockenspiel stabs feature prominently over frontperson Elias Bender Rønnenfelt’s playful scatting in the shamelessly poppy “Match Head Girl,” held together by an urgent, bass-driven groove that can barely contain its knotty twists and turns. Whereas on the jangly, hook-driven “1835,” Rønnenfelt replaces his usual cathartic bursts with an impassioned chorus sweetened by, of all things, a woodwind solo.

That such pop-minded gestures come so naturally to Iceage only confirms how they’re fully in control of the plot—and their often misconstrued legacy as swaggering provocateurs who only romanticise the morose. Even when the band is channelling a more rebellious spirit, like on the breakneck cowpunk of “Salve for Every Sore,” the band swings with an effervescence that practically explodes. On “Mother-of-Pearl,” they meld Sticky Fingers-era The Rolling Stones into Irish pub rock, culminating in a spirited celebration that leaves Rønnenfelt longing to “Be yours truly.”

While the gothic Americana-inspired tangents on For Love of Grace fall more in line with 2014’s Plowing Into the Field of Love, they’re moulded differently, as if the band consciously stripped away some of that album’s self-seriousness. Having honed his voice in his recent solo efforts, Rønnenfelt offers more untethered meditations on love. On the aptly twinkling “Star,” the band plays things surprisingly straight over a jangly hook as he delivers poetic declarations like, “Every inch of my earth and sky / You can occupy.” Here, his literary instincts feel driven less by twisted, world-weary delusions and more by pleading, dramatic affirmations.

Given its reliance on an interconnected blend of styles, For Love of Grace easily comes across as their most distinctly odd album to date–and that’s exactly why it works so well. Unconcerned with convention, Iceage move confidently at their own rhythm, weaving moments of musical levity into the grim vignettes that still lie at the heart of their sound.