Iceage Shed the Pretension on Their Most Direct Album Yet

The return to basics narrative gets applied to bands constantly, usually when they strip things back to whatever they were doing at the start. Iceage didn’t do that. On For Love of Grace & the Hereafter, the Danish five-piece retreated from the ornate arrangements of 2018’s Beyondless and 2021’s Seek Shelter, but they didn’t circle back to the sober hardcore of New Brigade either. What emerged instead is something looser, more garage-minded, and frankly more fun than anything they’ve put out.

Elias Rønnenfelt sounds different here. The nihilistic posturing that defined earlier records has given way to something more oblique. He’s older now. The band presumably have homes, relationships, responsibilities. That shift in circumstance filters through the lyrics, which lean toward aphorism and observation rather than ego. The result is Iceage’s most relaxed and cathartic release. Where past work occasionally bordered on pretentiousness, For Love carries almost none of that weight.

Opener “Ember” channels early Strokes more than any punk-hauteur blend of Black Flag and Joy Division. Those Ramones-adjacent riffs, the effervescent drums, Rønnenfelt drawling “I love you in an ominous way” — it summons a specific moment when rock music felt like it could banish problems through rhythm and a good tune. “Match Head Girl” works staccato chords against drawled declarations, still managing a genuinely uplifting bridge amid the swagger. The band can’t fully abandon their feel for dynamics and tonal variation, and they shouldn’t. That honed sensibility is what keeps the album from becoming a straightforward genre exercise. It’s a record made by people who learned how to write songs, then remembered how to enjoy playing them.