Two decades in, the Copenhagen band still treats each record as a matter of intent, not routine. Elias Rønnenfelt reflects on a career built outside the hype.
Iceage never planned on international attention. When the Copenhagen band broke out with 2011’s ‘New Brigade’, a raw post-punk debut released on Matador, the members were still teenagers who had simply wanted to reshape their own city. A Vice Album of the Month nod and a spot on the NME Cool List landed like an interruption, not a goal. “We had no aspirations to tour the US or Asia,” Elias Rønnenfelt recalls. “We didn’t plan on breaking through.”
Nearly twenty years after finding each other as misfit kids in primary school halls, the group is set to release its sixth album, ‘For Love Of Grace & The Hereafter’. The record arrives as something Rønnenfelt describes as sacred — a project that cannot exist for the sake of it. That discipline has guided Iceage from their early days of disjointed, incapable playing to the harmonic indie rock of more recent years.
What has not changed is a protective instinct. Even as audiences screamed lyrics back at them, the band remained distrustful of believing the excitement. Surviving the machinery without becoming absorbed by it took precedence. On the eve of a new chapter, that same guarded clarity shapes the work Iceage chooses to put forward.
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ROMBO Editorial Staff
The collective voice behind ROMBO Magazine’s news, reviews, features, and cultural coverage.
