Iceage’s Ruthless Evolution

In a wide-ranging interview, frontman Elias Bender Rønnenfelt reflects on the charges of racism and fascism his band faced at the start of their career and discusses their audacious forthcoming album, Seek Shelter.

Iceage, from left: Johan Suurballe Wieth, Jakob Tvilling Pless, Elias Bender Rønnenfelt, Casper Morilla Fernandez, Dan Kjær Nielsen. Photos by Jonas Bang

Confined to his Copenhagen apartment for the past year, Elias Bender Rønnenfelt found himself talking to his plants. “I didn’t know if it was a healthy thing or a worrisome thing,” the Iceage singer admits over Zoom. Known for his dour lyrics and menacing stage presence, Rønnenfelt assures me that he was not saying mean things to the greenery. Instead, he offered pep talks. “Oh, you’re looking a little tired on the left side, I’ll give you a bit of extra water,” he remembers telling his wilting herbs. The words of encouragement were not sufficient. “They all died,” Rønnenfelt concedes with a laugh.

The 29-year-old hasn’t stayed in one place for this long since he was a teenager, around the time Iceage released their 2011 debut album, New Brigade. Rønnenfelt and his bandmates—guitarist Johan Suurballe Wieth, drummer Dan Kjær Nielsen, and bassist Jakob Tvilling Pless—have spent the last decade in an evolutionary surge, releasing a string of records, each one grander than the last. On their forthcoming fifth LP, Seek Shelter, which was recorded in Lisbon in late 2019, it’s as though their earlier foundations of hardcore punk and sinister melodrama have been bulldozed and rebuilt into a temple: The raw material is the same, but the construction is loftier and more refined.

For the album, the band added a new guitarist, Casper Morilla Fernandez, and enlisted an outside producer for the first time in Peter “Sonic Boom” Kember, who Rønnenfelt describes as having “a healthy dose of insanity.” A founding member of influential psych-rockers Spacemen 3, Kember has also helped the likes of Panda Bear and MGMT achieve their headiest ambitions. Blaring trumpets, shrill violins, and the soaring voices of Portugal’s Lisboa Gospel Collective are featured throughout the record, as Iceage traipses from Britpop bombast to ’70s Americana to a swaying, soft-shoe number Burt Bacharach could have crafted. After making their name with records steeped in icy insolence, Seek Shelter is their most inviting album to date: It’s easy to imagine a new song like “Gold City,” with its chattering tambourine and Springsteen-style magnitude, sung to an arena full of revelers.

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