Iceage’s Elias Rønnenfelt isn’t afraid of failure

Failure is a thrill for Iceage’s Elias Rønnenfelt — or at least the specter of it is.

The Copenhagen rocker has been thrashing out his hard-scrabbled poetry with his band Iceage for 18 years now, beginning first with 2011’s thunderous New Brigade and later expanding to a new VistaVision lens on their 2014 critical breakout, Plowing Into the Field of Love. The band recorded that album, and their latest, For Love of Grace & the Hereafter at the same place: Silence Studio, “a big, old wooden house” in the Swedish forest, near the Norwegian border.

Their return 12 years after their first stint in the studio became a source of grounding for Rønnenfelt and his bandmates, Dan Kjær Nielsen, Jakob Tvilling Pless, Johan S. Weith, and Casper Morilla Fernandez). The studio’s sense of familiarity and safety was needed to offset a dangerous uncertainty that’s become an integral part of their creative process.

“There was no time for second-thinking or to rest the mind, because we were in a battle against time,” Rønnenfelt tells The FADER of the album’s conception which took only seven days. “That’s something we do in order to create this magnetized intensity. For Iceage, it kind of works that it could fail.” Instinct brought Rønnenfelt surprising moments of musical magic as well, like on “The Weak,” when he used a flute and a whistle he found laying around the studio, put them both in his mouth, and hit record. “I don’t know, I thought it was magical,” he smiles.

That intuition can be heard across Rønnenfelt’s oeuvre, both with Iceage, and in his expanding solo career. Since 2024, he’s released two solo albums and one full collaborative project with British musical enigma, Dean Blunt. In May, Rønnenfelt stopped by The FADER for a conversation with Salvatore Maicki to talk about Iceage’s new album, his impossible-to-label solo work, and the expanding lore of his own Copenhagen music scene. Watch the full conversation below and on YouTube, and read the transcript. —Tobias Hess

The FADER: Alright, Elias. Welcome to The FADER. Welcome to New York. How’s the city been to you on this trip thus far?

ELIAS RØNNENFELT: Well, this is the beginning of my tour. Rolled through Baltimore, Philly, Boston, and then here yesterday, and it’s just been press. I haven’t done shit that isn’t talking.

Yeah. Right.

Yeah. But I can talk more.

Is this city synonymous with you just getting pummeled by press opportunities, or do you have better associations with this place?

I have a long history with the city of New York. It’s the first city in the U.S. that we ever played, that I ever went to. Iceage first came here back in 2011. We put out the first album and it blew up. Suddenly we were quite hyped and we were able to go pretty much anywhere and play. We had just started the band because we kind of wanted to change things in Copenhagen or immediately around us. We hadn’t really strived for an international breakthrough. Suddenly this attention spreads like wildfire, and we’re going to New York and there’s an allure to New York when you’ve never even set foot in America. There’s an awareness of New York and the history. And it’s a big thing to get to the city.

We got there and [to New York City] on the other side of the world and there’s all these Americans screaming along lyrics and kids that really took to the music. But that was also the first time we were really confronted with the industry and we were 17, 18 years old. There’s all these fucking grown ups that want to buy us drinks and everybody wants to buy us a drink. What is that about? And they want to set up meetings with their representatives. The shock of that kind of made us very guarded. Like everybody’s a potential snake.

Because of ulterior motives?

Yeah. Especially when you’re so young. And we come from a tradition in music where there’s practically none of that. But then we knew people in New York from the 538 Johnson [a Bushwick venue, now closed] sort of scene, and the boys from Crazy Spirit and Pharmakon. So we had an in on people in New York. We just ran off away from the label people and all that as best we could, we’d sit at night and drink beers under the Brooklyn Bridge or something, because we were underage. It’s been a city I spent a lot of time in over the years, the city that through various periods I just stranded myself in and got lost in it a little bit. So yeah, there’s so much history with the city that it’s hard to even encapsulate.

A lot of my associations with your music are with these certain times and eras of New York: the more DIY era of Bushwick and Marching Church playing at Sunnyvale.

285 Kent, we did a lot of shows there. It’s funny to have known a city long enough that you’ve been a part of bygone eras, right?

I feel like you did a good job with the project before this last album, doing the Elizabeth Street garden. You were kind of just posted up.

Yeah, For a few years in a row I would ride out on the day. You could find me in this corner in Elizabeth Street Park. And then a ton of people showed up. I was just touring with a guitar, playing by myself and discovering sort of the freedom in that you can actually just do a show anywhere. I hope to kind of do it annually.

How does New York City feel now? We’re in an era where [some] people here are really mythologizing Copenhagen right now. Have you considered that?

Ah, the tables have turned. But people are always mythologizing us, totally. Like to a fault. That mythologizing has also been a thing that has pushed us to keep moving. It comes with a certain set of boxes. People get an idea of who you are. I get the feeling that they want me to be this or that. I want to strive to move out of those boxes, and that also sparked this sort of rapid evolution of Iceage in the early days, because suddenly we were pigeonholed as the saviors of punk or this dangerous adolescent gang of teenagers. We had barely found ourselves. We were so young and so reactionary. We just wanted to explode in the face of things. But it was very instinctive.

So that’s why when we made Plowing,” the third Iceage record, which was quite a departure. We had made most of those songs by the time that the second album [You’re Nothing] came out, and when we did the tour, we almost only played unknown songs from Plowing.

People wanted to mosh, and here we were playing songs that were wildly different, that nobody knew, which meant for a whole tour we were just getting booed and bottled. It would be this interesting divide of half the audience thinking this was really interesting and half of them hating it. But we kind of got off on it because it felt like we were taking control. You think you have one idea? Well, too late, you know?

Same thing [with the solo records]. I put out the first solo record [Heavy Glory], and that was the first thing I did in my own name, my birth certificate name. Suddenly, because it’s the only thing you released you’re fully defined by this one record. That pushed me to move extremely quickly with something different because I felt like my name is attached to one record. I almost needed to do something radically different to state that this [project] is not just one thing.

There’s this new younger generation that idolizes this “esoteric Copenhagen” vibe now that you guys helped build. Is this new audience different from the audience that expected that dangerous Iceage energy would bring in the 2010s?

Yeah when I meet people [fans] and I talk to them, they’re really niche. They’ll come up and mention some song I haven’t thought about for 10 years. That’s cool because I’m such a crate digger, and that’s how I grew up getting into music and discovery. So the fact that people are diving down into various records from a while back, that’s sick. Especially with the really young people, they’d be singing along to songs that they weren’t around for when they first came out. That’s the best thing you could hope for: a song that transcends the era that it was made in.

When you go back to your own music and experience it again, has anything from those earlier years changed in meaning for you?

Yes and no. It’s hard for me to listen back too much because I don’t want to be too rooted in the past. But every now and again, you hear something that’s from a bygone era. Pretty much everything I ever did was a total document of where I was at the time. It’s a crystallized thing of a former self. In the same way, it can be a bit hard to read old diary entries. It can be super cringe. I mean, it’s who I was. Some songs seem like they can carry with me and I can keep singing them and they feel genuine. And some, they retire. Because if it feels like a giant old song and it feels like I’m cosplaying me, then [it feels] gross.

Listening to For Love of Grace & The Hereafter, it’s relentlessly fun and groovy. It sounds like you guys are really leaning into how playful you can be as a band. Did it feel that way while you were recording?

Certainly. We were writing it with a mentality, thinking about a stage and shows, and what music we want to be there. We were at a place where we wanted absolutely no excessive weight. Every second had to earn its keep, and do something that was extremely “the band.”

When we headed into the studio, we only booked seven days, which seems like just too little to make it perfect and have everything ready for recording. It wasn’t the mentality of like, Okay, let’s go into the studio and explore these songs or find ourselves or what is the nature of them? No. This was like, Get up there. We know what we’re going to do, push record. It was a “let it happen” kind of thing. We were trying to be sharp, and it was fun. It was intense. There was no time for second-thinking or second-doubting or to rest the mind, because we were in a battle against time to execute everything we set out to do. But I think that’s something we do in order to create this magnetized intensity where every second matters and there are things at stake. For Iceage, it kind of works that it could fail.

When you’re working under such an intense deadline like that, when do you know you can step away and step outside of the music? How much of that existed during these intense seven days?

Well, that happens both in the writing and the recording, but you start in frog’s eye perspective, and only towards the very end does it shift to a bird’s eye. All this care and feeling has gone into the writing of the material, but now there’s this extremely compressed small moment to make it forever. In this brief time, what you do is crystallized. Even though you’re presenting whatever problem is happening immediately in front of you, the question is always whether the song is getting brought justice? It’s like, Does the instinct tell us that this is where it needs to be?

Did you feel more precious about any of the songs on the record than others?

No, we don’t really cherry pick like that. For us, every album, every song matters. It’s not like, we know these three are going to kill and we need some decent stuff to make it into an album. We don’t even think of things as singles as we write stuff at all. So no, we don’t really cherry pick like that.

Is that a recorder solo [I hear] at the end of “The Weak?”

It’s two flutes. It was going to be a harmonica solo. And then up in Sweden I was about to record it, and I figured out that I had brought a harmonica in the wrong key, and it sounded terrible. And I was like, “Fuck, I really want to get this down.” And then there was a box with [a tin whistle and a] flute sticking out of it, and I was like, “Hey, wait, wait a second.” And then I put them both in my mouth, and just like that, that was the first take. I don’t know, I thought it was magical.

You were under the gun, so you just had to do it?

Yeah. That’s one of those great things about why I prefer studios that have a fair amount of junk around, because there’s always these moments where things end up being this surprise contribution to a song because it’s just lying around. You’ll find some beat up old string instrument that’s out of tune, but three of the strings happen to be in an interesting frequency with one particular part of a song. That ends up elevating or creating some magic in a part. Everything I’ve ever done is filled with these happenstances where the right thing was just lying in the right corner at the right moment.

I know you guys don’t like to get super nostalgic about these things, but you’re stepping into Silent Studios for the first time in 12 years. Did any memories of that time from recording Plowing Into The Field of Love flood back when you were revisiting this hallowed space?

Yeah. To put some context, it’s just this studio in the middle of the woods in Sweden, close to the Norwegian border. It’s a big old wooden house. Red, classic Swedish wood paint situated on the top of a hill. And then it’s just forest around it. Some old hippies built it back in the ‘70s and turned that old house into a studio. We haven’t been there for 12 years.

We actually have a policy that we don’t return to studios with Iceage, but we broke that because we just thought it was sad, never doing a record there again. And yeah, 12 years later, we came back with a truck filled with all our gear and everything was exactly how we left it. So it was almost like stepping into a memory or something because it just felt totally untouched. And there was an old faithfulness about it.

When we recorded Plowing there there was this old pump organ from the 1800s. And the song “Against the Moon,” that you mentioned, was written on that pump organ. We didn’t go into the studio with that song. When everybody was asleep, I’d sit up at night with that pump organ and that song was birthed up there and that organ was still there. So it was kind of nice. I was like, “I need to use it.” [That organ is] on quite a few things in this record as well, [and] it’s like the very same organ.

Where does it appear on the record?

The end of “1835,” the opening chord of “Tender Blades,” and some melodic chorus stuff in “Mother of Pearl.”

“1835” is one of my favorite tracks on the record. Can you tell me about that one a bit more? I feel like the lyrics are sort of obviously calling back to a specific historical event?

I didn’t start writing lyrics for Ice Age albums until like a few weeks before we had to go into the studio. Because if I wrote them as the music was written, it would be a fractured picture, and I like to write [lyrics] extremely shortly before because I like high stakes and because you make sure that across the entire album there’s not a fixed concept or nothing. But then in making of the songs, I like to improvise and blabber these lyrics, like semi-gibberish English. Sometimes, a word kind of sticks.

I kept singing “1835” in that part. So that was kind of the starting point. Then I was like, just googling things that happened in 1835 like, Where can I go off from there? I found something about a terrible earthquake in Chile. And yeah, one thing just led to the next, and it became a song about everyone who died and all the nameless dead. Just sort of like the vast sea of people who came before, and having a certain feeling that they’re still there. So in a convoluted way, that’s where it led me.

There’s definitely an undercurrent of mortality across all of these songs on the record. Was that colored by the time when you were writing them?

It’s just a tendency. I noticed that a bunch of these songs wanted to speak about an afterlife, and that wasn’t planned. That was just where my brain wanted to go. [“1835” is] about the ones that are forgotten and have been forgotten, or not forgotten at all. But it’s also about an afterlife that doesn’t involve death, and life and the punches you roll with, and the difficult things you live through, and places in life where you feel like you can be at a seemingly impenetrable state of non-function. But with a certain perseverance or living through things, you find yourself on the other side of these things. That can feel like an afterlife to a former life within this one.

I was intrigued hearing you talk about filming the two music videos at Mayhem and how they reference this time in your youth at the Youth House? Why did it feel important on this record to acknowledge that juncture of youth, DIY culture and the state?

I mean, I did a music video on the Ungdomshuset ground zero that Fousheé, the singer, shot. I was at a bar two streets down and I had to deliver the music video in a few days, and all I had was a baseball bat. So we just went over there and recorded it. And Mayhem, that’s a DIY space that’s been really instrumental in the upbringing of Iceage and the Copenhagen experimental music scene. It’s still our rehearsal space, so it’s not really that we thought of it as like, “oh, now is the time to acknowledge…” It’s like, “okay, we’re going to make music videos, well have a space.” But it is good to represent them because these spaces have been [beneficial] to our growth. And there’s not really a timeline without them. You know how we talked about all the Brooklyn places that have vanished pretty much, those nonprofit places where people can just fail and experiment, and it’s not money driven, and it’s just kind of people doing it for people’s sake. It’s so extremely [beneficial] to growing as an unschooled musician, and it’s community as well. So we all owe big debt to places like that.

18 years into it, this far along into the band’s tenure, how are you guys able to still exist in this space and find stability? There’s so much trust to continue to explore these themes of mortality, for example.

Life is tumultuous and it’s uncertain. Life is filled with great uncertainty. And I don’t think we could do anything else like it. I never look at a record I’ve done and think of it as much of a choice. In hindsight, it always ends up feeling like the only possible outcome. Because it’s always a reflection of your circumstances. Since the early days, it’s been reflective in the music that we were aiming to bring the confusion of being alive into it. Because life is not just one feeling, It’s a multitude of conflicting emotions that all culminate and give birth, and burst into a certain thing. But then the next thing takes over. I think the music mirrors that.