Five years is a long time to leave the world without a new Iceage record, though Elias Rønnenfelt has hardly been idle — a debut solo album, a poetry collection, a collaboration with Dean Blunt. When he returns with the full band, it isn’t with the sweeping ambition of Seek Shelter, their gospel-and-chanson-inflected fifth. The pitch for album six is smaller, more deliberate: back to first principles, they said. Immediate, urgent, raw, fast. Strip the weight.
What they’ve made instead is something more interesting than a back-to-basics record. For Love of Grace & the Hereafter maintains some of the soulful melodicism of its predecessor but with a lighter, breezier sensibility — the first Iceage album that feels less like a significant shift and more like a band easing into a groove. The barely-contained chaos of their early hardcore years isn’t really here. What is here is fifteen years of accumulated craft, applied with the confidence of people who no longer need to prove anything.
Opener “Ember” gets to the point immediately — raucously lively and charismatically charming, with a constant stream of fizzing energy that both pulsates and punctuates the record. The band pivot easily between tempos and moods mid-song; “Match Head Girl” and “No Fear” demonstrate a deftness with dynamic shifts that would have felt alien on New Brigade. “No Fear” in particular is a shimmering post-punk-pop song with sparkling guitars, freed from the weight of fuzz or feedback — almost pretty, which is not a word you’d have applied to Iceage a decade ago. “True Blue” melds country-rock with shoegaze’s pitch-bent disorientation and somehow holds together. “1835” swings with a breezy rhythmic looseness that only sharpens the absurdism of its lyrics.
Rønnenfelt remains constitutionally incapable of writing a cheerful lyric. Love here is still a form of siege warfare, a condition that brings ruin. On “Star,” he begs the object of his desire to occupy every inch of his earth and sky, to cover him entirely; when the tightly wound grooves burst in the outro, annihilation sounds like a bacchanal. The bleakness doesn’t feel performed though — it feels like the only honest register available to him.
Where the album surprised critics — and earns its high marks — is in the glee underneath all this darkness. There’s a newfound lightness on the record; even with the amps maxed out and the songs not exactly hymns of optimism, there’s a sense of Iceage finding hope within the chaos for the first time. Closer “True Blue” is woozy and disarming. The toy-piano-and-recorder moments are genuinely funny. You suspect the band are having more fun than they are letting on.
The album recalls the kinetic energy of their first two records while possessing the sophistication of their more recent output — which is to say it splits the difference rather neatly. Whether that constitutes a new direction or a brief holiday from ambition probably depends on where you came in. Either way, the streak continues.
