Following a five-year hiatus, the Danish quintet return with their sixth album, delivering a set of striking ballads. With a mix of maddeningly danceable rural energy and emotionally mercurial lyrics, For Love of Grace & The Hereafter sparkles like a firework erupting in slow motion.
Iceage have long been a band who call their own shots. First bursting onto the music scene as teens with 2011’s New Brigade, the band has continually evolved sonically, progressing from hardcore punk to a softer, more anthemic style on their last album, Seek Shelter. Alongside this artistic growth, the band has managed to remain one of the rock underground’s more elusive gems, despite having well over a decade’s worth of musical output to their name.
Now, on their latest album, they have decided to return to their roots of high-intensity, visceral rock. What distinguishes this from being a creative backpedal is that Iceage are now applying the knowledge and experience gained from their aforementioned evolution to bring a new sense of maturity to their typically chaotic style. The songs on For Love and Grace & The Hereafter may appear to be messy and scraped together, yet there is a meticulous purpose to how everything is presented.
Take the opening of ‘Match Head Girl’, where frontman Elias Rønnenfelt joyfully scat-sings over a staccato mellotron, driving drums and jagged rhythmic guitar chords. There are a lot of separate components to take in, yet the result is surprisingly easy on the ears. Deep cuts such as ‘Holy Water’, ‘Lifetime’, and ‘1835’ keep up an impressive level of energy throughout, making this an album difficult to tire of. The band is careful not to let this energy overwhelm the album, delivering slower songs such as ‘Tender Blades’ and ‘No Fear’ to add both tonal variation and some breathing space.
However, there are moments when the deliberately rough nature of the tracks gets the better of them. Rønnenfelt’s singing, particularly on the vocally exposed refrains of ‘Star’ and ‘True Blue’, can be jarring; anyone familiar with his solo work or his collaborative effort with Dean Blunt on 2025’s lucrewill understand. ‘The Weak’ features a hilariously awful recorder solo which, whilst suiting the light-hearted nature of the song, does not make it pleasant to listen to. Thankfully, these disjointed moments are few and far between.
Perhaps the biggest change Iceage presents with this album is in the content of Rønnenfelt’s lyrics. As the title would suggest, this album is about love, yet Rønnenfelt doesn’t sing of love as a given. He talks about wanting to be smothered by it on ‘Star’ (“every inch of my earth and sky you can occupy, cover me entirely”), whilst on ‘Ember’ he presents it in a sinister, obsessive and slightly crass manner (“I love you in an ominous way”). With his background in poetry, he has consistently crafted engaging narratives within the band’s music and in his latest work he’s at his most volatile, exploring love as a driving and destructive force.
For Love of Grace & The Hereafter marks another original chapter for the band, who have successfully returned to what was so appealing about their earlier work without exact imitation. By combining their honed ability to produce energetic and enjoyable music with new lyrical and structural approaches, this album serves as both exciting material for fans and a fantastic introduction for new listeners.
“Iceage performing in Toronto in 2013” by CRUSTINA! is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
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