Towards the end of the pandemic, Iceage vocalist Elias Rønnenfelt was crisscrossing Europe with his guitar in hand. His travels were spearheaded by a post he had shared on social media – a standing offer to play anywhere that would have him. “I put out that post, and over the span of a year, I really travelled,” he tells NME. “Hundreds of emails came in, and I said yes to anything that seemed viable – it let me play in bookstores and churches and private homes and in the middle of forests.”
Appropriately, the songs Rønnenfelt wrote while eating up the miles are both richly drawn and minimalist. This reflects their beginnings as bare-bones live tracks and also the melodic evolution of his work with Iceage, from steely post-punk on their 2011 debut ‘New Brigade’ to the flamboyant rock of 2021’s ‘Seek Shelter’.
On ‘Heavy Glory’, his voice hangs in the air over ringing guitars, delivering a bruised but romantic mix of fiction and autobiography that revolves around the creative conceit of “the lover”. This shapeshifting presence is given depth by carefully selected instrumental swatches, from percussion by Iceage drummer Dan Kjær Nielsen to notes pulled from an autoharp found lying on the floor of a studio.
“Some of the strings just happened to be perfectly out of tune,” Rønnenfelt says. Read on to discover what “the lover” means to him, why he carries a notebook, and how it feels to have your heroes become your peers.
NME: Hi Elias. You’ve said in the past that you need a lot of time, almost a lot of emptiness, to write. Did you find that the pandemic essentially provided too much of that – that there was no punctuation to those silences until you could grab your guitar and play?
Elias Rønnenfelt: “Yeah, to the point that I fucking hate bringing up the pandemic to any extent. Let’s forget about it, you know? I don’t want this to be viewed as a pandemic record in any way. Maybe it was sparked by the tail end of it, when you could do shit again, almost at normal volume. But the lockdowns and such… that was not a creative period.”
You were writing songs on the road and then playing them the same night. It’s unusual to have immediate feedback like that.
“I’m out here on my own with a guitar. I can write something, play it right away, and it doesn’t have to be rehearsed. There was freedom in that, realising that the road from writing to putting it in front of people is extremely short. That’s the common thing for all of the songs on the record – they were meant to be able to function when stripped back to basics. Iceage always did that as well. We always played new material before it was anywhere near recorded. We took a perverse enjoyment in playing whole shows of unknown songs.”
“You’re left at the mercy of where life takes you, and then that’s what you’ve got to work with”
The other side of that coin is that you spent a full year recording ‘Heavy Glory’ alongside your co-producer Nis Bysted, with space and time weathering the songs. Even then, they haven’t lost any of their directness. They’re kind of ornate without ever being crowded.
“It wasn’t some kind of dogma or code that I had to walk by. I just built them from the ground up. We went into the studio and did the initial sessions with Dan on drums and an upright bass player. With some of them, I was like, ‘Ah, fuck this shit. I’ll bring in a drum machine or something.’ Nothing was holy in that sense – it was servicing the writing by whatever means necessary.”
When did you pick up the thread of “the lover”?
“I didn’t really have much of a say in the matter. You’re dealt the hand you play. I’ve never really felt like I had much of a choice in any record that I’ve done – you’re left at the mercy of where life takes you, and then that’s what you’ve got to work with, even musically. You roll with the punches, and it comes out in whatever mangled way it wants to.”
On ‘Seek Shelter’, you alluded to the idea that a person, as much as a place, can be a sanctuary. Is that something you dig deeper into here?
“That is a delusion that so many of us entertain. It’d be nice, but it’s most often something we strive for when we don’t got it, you know? I feel lucky that there are certain people that anchor me or serve as a pillar of trust or consistency in my life, but often when there’s that need for sanctuary in another person, it’s either temporary or a lost cause”.
With that record, you really foregrounded melody in a way you’d perhaps only hinted at in the past. That’s an obvious hangover here – how do you view the meshing of hook and lyric now?
“There’s not really a set formula, but often they come separately. That’s one of the comforts of lyric writing that definitely got illustrated when I wrote the poetry book [2023’s Sunken Heights] – how nice it is to have set amounts of verses and syllables to frame the whole thing. It just makes the possibilities less endless, and the melody guides the words as well. You can be playful with it, or you can disappoint the melody. There are more things to keep you occupied.”
There is poetic writing here that’s open to interpretation, along with imagery lifted from mundane, real-life situations, like a wait at Luton airport. How do you go about mixing those two differing approaches?
“I carry notebooks. They serve as a bank where I can steal from myself instead of somebody else, but more and more, I try to aim for just seeing whatever the fuck spills out on the page.”
With the covers that finish the record – ‘Sound Of Confusion’ by Spacemen 3 and Townes Van Zandt’s ‘No Place To Fall – is that you saying, ‘You can learn a lot about me from what inspires me’?
“I started playing those as I was travelling as well. A friend of mine in Paris had this bookstore I was playing at, and she was like, ‘Make sure you play ‘No Place To Fall’.’ I learned it, and it stayed with me. In Lisbon I was playing in a church, and Sonic Boom [Pete Kember] from Spacemen 3 was living on the outskirts. I was just wondering if I could get away with asking him to play the organ on that song. They took root, and they felt a part of the whole thing.”
You made ‘Seek Shelter’ with Sonic Boom and now there’s this cool postscript. It’s basically the opposite of ‘don’t meet your heroes’.
“Spacemen 3 were part of my teenage bedroom. The world got a whole lot bigger, but for a while, it was very small, and the notion of Spacemen 3 or anybody else being someone you could hang out with was not realistic. But when you meet people they quickly become the person that they’ve always been. Pete, for example, he’s hilarious. When we recorded ‘Seek Shelter’ our stomach muscles were hurting because we bullshitted so much.”
Elias Rønnenfelt’s ‘Heavy Glory’ is out now via Escho