Iceage have announced their long-awaited sixth studio album, ‘For Love Of Grace & The Hereafter’ – listen to new single ‘Ember’ below.
The Danish punk rock band are due to release the follow-up to 2021’s ‘Seek Shelter’ on May 29 via Mexican Summer. Pre-order/pre-save here.
It comes after the group returned last month with the single ‘Star’, marking their first new music in five years. This song will appear on their forthcoming 12-track record, along with opener ‘Ember’.
“The songs needed to be immediate, urgent, raw, and fast,” explained frontman Elias Rønnenfelt. “We wanted to try to shed any unnecessary weight. Catching outlets of energy is what excites us the most.”
‘For Love Of Grace & The Hereafter’ is described as Iceage’s “tightest album to date, even glossy at times, but not tight enough to dull its pulse”. It contains “wordless howls, nastily detuned riffs that bend into harmony, breakdowns, handclaps, and a chaotic choral break seemingly played on pennywhistles”.
The project, produced and mixed by Iceage and Nis Bysted, showcases the band’s “fundamental curiosity and trust in their instincts”, and has been called “bright and energetic”.
It was recorded last year at Silence Studio in rural Sweden, where Iceage also made 2014’s ‘Plowing Into The Field Of Love’. They returned to the same studio in a bid to capture “the same intense energy”.
The lyrics were written only a few weeks before the group headed to the studio to prevent the record from being too fragmented and to “increase the sense of risk and urgency”.
A description adds: “There is no affectation or prescription to this record – no palette of curated influence or sought sound. It is the sum total of inspirations, shared openly in the name of playing and playing’s pleasures.”
Beginning with a twinkling glockenspiel and guitar intro, new single ‘Ember’ quickly launches into a raucous indie-rock sound. The barrelling tune invites its subject to race through the city of love, with Rønnenfelt declaring: “I love you in an ominous way/ Are you willing to pay? Are you willing to break?”
The accompanying music video was directed by the band and Ira Rønnenfelt. Tune in above.
The full tracklist for Iceage’s ‘For Love Of Grace & The Hereafter’ is:
1. ‘Ember’
2. ‘Match Head Girl’
3. ‘The Weak’
4. ‘No Fear’
5. ‘Salve For Every Sore’
6. ‘mother-of-pearl’
7. ‘Tender Blades’
8. ‘1835’
9. ‘Star’
10. ‘Lifetime”
11. ‘Holy Water’
12. ‘True Blue’
Rønnenfelt’s first solo project, ‘Heavy Glory’, arrived in 2024. He spoke to NME that year about how he’d been inspired by musical travels across Europe, where he would write music in the day, then road-test songs at shows at night.
“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,” he explained
“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.”
In a four-star review of ‘Seek Shelter’, NME hailed the collection as “a record that never sits still, an album of considerable polish and scope and by far the boldest thing the Danes have ever made, but also an album that still feels distinctly theirs”.