Iceage stay raucous, love turns ominous on For Love

Iceage For – On For Love of Grace & the Hereafter, Iceage trade their more solitary recent drift for something faster and louder—capturing love as a spark, a flood, and a threat. The Denmark punks’ immediacy meets gory, rugged lyrics and meticulous sequencing, from “I love

When Elias Rønnenfelt opens For Love of Grace & the Hereafter with the line “you like an ember falling down. ” it doesn’t feel like a metaphor meant to be admired from a distance. It lands like studio heat. And it lands because Iceage—Danish punks who have made a habit of blurring the narrative details of their songs—sound like a band actively trying to catch their own velocity.

Rønnenfelt’s language can stay gory and rugged, but the band’s atmosphere has changed. The record comes after the time it’s taken Iceage to move forward since their 2011 debut New Brigade. with the last couple of albums requiring “up to two weeks” to record. For Love of Grace & the Hereafter pushes them back into a speedier, raucous approach. They recorded it in the middle of the woods. at the same studio where they made 2014’s Plowing Into the Field of Love. and the impression is less about polish than urgency—ideas running for dear life while the quintet locks in.

That urgency is clearest immediately on “Ember. ” where xylophone and electric guitar briefly interlock before the album breaks into a rhythm section that sounds “remarkably in flux even as it holds tight.” The chorus declaration—“I love you in an ominous way”—reads like a dare. Love, here, isn’t gentle. It’s combustible.

The record keeps feeding that fire in wildly different shapes. On “Match Head Girl. ” Rønnenfelt belts out. “Make the world combust with every strike. ” as if trying to erase the ego of “my world.” The performance feels responsive in real time: drummer Dan Kjær Nielsen and bassist Jakob Tvilling Pless seem to meet the narrator’s commands as they land. When Rønnenfelt orders the band to “rise a flood miraculously. ” guitars grow torrential and strings emerge. and the song’s metaphor—swimming in someone’s arteries—turns visceral instead of tidy.

Even when the imagery tilts toward the morbid, Iceage find release through texture. “The Weak” leans into rockabilly-inflected punk and lands as a breath of fresh air. despite lyrics about a “My little sparrow” that “used to sing / Teared its feathers on the bars. and I cut its wings / Crushing its spirit might just help the lyrics” — with Rønnenfelt’s choice of language framed as “I mean. Jesus.” The hook—“Life is for the weak”—stays anthemic. while a pennywhistle solo slips in off-kilter charm.

“No Fear” continues the theme of intravenous desire. with Rønnenfelt singing “In our morning of a million suns / Course through my veins undressed.” But unlike “Match Head Girl. ” the track’s clean guitar and roiling bassline suggest a morning-after soberness. The poetry is still intense—dizzied, blessed, gentle, reverent—yet the sound implies the singer has come up for air.

By “Salve for Every Sore,” Iceage are switching tempo with rollicking drums, pushing heavenly-love language into something physical. The conviction that “heaven harbours envy for us” sits beside the intimate idea of “tangled bodies seeming to relieve persistent soreness. ” and the line “I get the impression you’re a salve for every sore” reads like an admission he can’t shake—even as his voice betrays “total confidence.”.

Then “mother-of-pearl” takes the album to its most complicated place. The title being lowercase doesn’t soften anything: the bounciest song on the record. and its centerpiece. turns to the shitty circumstances surrounding a working girl’s pregnancy—where “circumstances” is a euphemism for men. from the fresh-out-of-prison father to the narrator convinced he knows what she wants: “not feeling like foeticide. ” and “knocked up and hormonal.” It’s a song that makes you hope she gets away from it all. even while the music carries momentum that refuses to look away.

Throughout, the band’s groove keeps returning to extremes love drives us toward. On “Tender Blades. ” they coil around a piercing line that cuts deeper than the album’s lighter material. focusing on fantasies high on God complex and the intersection of pleasure and pain. Rønnenfelt puts it in terms like “It’s in your hammering of lilies where there would be nails. ” and his tone suggests there’s no question about whether it’s worth it—only a desperation for the frenzy to be mutual.

There are moments where the pressure doesn’t fully turn into substance. “1835” keeps locked in place and seems unbothered by Rønnenfelt’s grim reflections on mortality, but the track feels more serviceable than truly substantial.

The album’s sequencing. though. keeps proving that Iceage know how to build a kind of emotional architecture out of desire. “Star” channels the brightest aspirations on the record—“hard to imagine many rock songs matching its brilliance this year.” After three tracks that shift focus as if “ten minutes away from one’s object of affection” and feel “tantamount to death. ” “Star” becomes an outpouring of desire that reads celestial rather than human. When Rønnenfelt sings. “Every inch of my earth and sky / You can occupy / Cover me entirely. ” the Earth appears small. “merely a servant to the heavens.”.

From there. “Lifetime” brings convulsive energy powered by a classic chord progression. with Nielsen “tumbles and crashes through every cymbal” as Rønnenfelt keeps gasping for air—“Feral moon. oh. how you claw through time / My lone diluted friend.” “Holy Water” ratchets up the wonky interplay. lively guitar undulating around a knotty beat. and you can see why you’d want a single for it.

They save the album’s biggest outlier for last: “True Blue” arrives with disarmingly shoegazey guitars that suit the rapturous conclusion. You can almost hear how it could have begun as a Rønnenfelt solo cut. but the band bends it to their will—Rønnenfelt bellows. “And just you wait. there’s worlds to unravel. ” keeping the “for us silent” he doesn’t finish saying. Even so, you can hear it reverberate through the band’s ceaseless momentum.

Put simply: the album’s dominant feeling isn’t just that love is intense. It’s that Iceage are capable of catching that intensity while it’s still hot—sparks in the air when the studio lights stay on, not a finished story you can step back from.

Iceage For Love of Grace & the Hereafter album review Danish punk Elias Rønnenfelt Dan Kjær Nielsen Jakob Tvilling Pless Plowing Into the Field of Love punk rock