Over 18 years and five studio albums, with each evolutionary jump and a new vein of existing, Iceage have worked inside the idea of collapse. That collapse, or the thrill of being close to it, was a way of playing, singing and writing—a tumbling through life in song, catching it as it falls. Throughout the Danes’ sixth studio album, For Love of Grace & the Hereafter, there’s another layer of sparkle to the band. Passion and romantic love has typically framed Iceage's songs as a form of resistance, yet throughout For Love of Grace & the Hereafter, it flows pure and unafraid. It’s both fun and as serious as ever, growing and glowing through love.
Produced and mixed by the band (Elias Rønnenfelt, Dan Kjær Nielsen, Jakob Tvilling Pless, Johan S. Weith, and Casper Morilla Fernandez) and Nis Bysted, the album is bright and energetic. “The first songs started emerging immediately after making Heavy Glory,” Rønnenfelt mentions, referring to his 2024 solo album. “Having had an outlet for stripped-back balladry, it felt like the right thing to channel a more ferocious side of ourselves for the band's next step.” This next step sounds like running, but in a new direction; running to be somewhere and with someone, rather than running away or into the fire.
Formed in 2008, Iceage were teenagers when their debut, New Brigade (2011), was released, blending post-punk and hardcore, quickly gaining international recognition. You’re Nothing (2012) intensified the youthful aggression while later albums, Plowing Into the Field of Love (2014), Beyondless (2018) and Seek Shelter (2021), introduced a grand, world-weary vaudeville element to their sound.
For Love of Grace & the Hereafter was recorded at Silence Studio; a modest house in remote, rural Sweden near the Norwegian border, a river and nothing. The quintet lived above the studio living room for a week in November 2025, just six months before the album’s target release date. Twelve years ago they recorded Plowing Into the Field of Love at the same studio. It is the only time they have returned to a studio to cut a record and is no coincidence.
Capturing that same intense energy was something the band wanted to portray with the new album. “The songs needed to be immediate, urgent, raw and fast and they couldn’t be too long,” Rønnenfelt reveals. “We wanted to try to shed any unnecessary weight. Catching outlets of energy which is what excites us the most.” They played hard that week. Clarity was the plan and by owning every aspect of the sound, they were catching moments by communicating and leaning on their experiences, the thousands of hours on stages they’ve shared since they were teenagers. The setup was as minimal as possible, short on overdubs, making decisions live, patient full takes, talking and trying things, going for it, not thinking too much. Fast, fleeting, collapsing.
The result is Iceage’s tightest album to date, even glossy at times, but not fussy, not tight enough to dull its pulse. With quick turnarounds, wordless howls, nastily detuned riffs that bend into harmony, crispy yet stuffed drum patterns, breakdowns, handclaps, a chaotic stacked choral break seemingly played on pennywhistles, For Love of Grace & the Hereafter is a showcase of the band’s fundamental curiosity and trust in their instincts. 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.
Since Seek Shelter, Rønnenfelt has honed in his craft through tireless touring, experimental solo records (Heavy Glory, 2024, and Speak Daggers, 2025) and collaborations with the likes of Dean Blunt, Yung Lean and Fousheé, translating into novel structure and delivery. A prolific writer, Elias Rønnenfelt writes from a place of grit, but today it is joyously animated. Through literature and life experience, he has developed a voice that is both independent, forever on the street, and eternally romantic, florid about what matters. As a method to prevent the overall picture from being too fragmented and to increase the sense of risk and urgency, the lyrics for For Love of Grace & the Hereafter were only written a few weeks before entering the studio. “It's not a radical shift in point of view; it's further down the line,” the band disclose. “But a certain shift in lifestyle and other events has perhaps enabled us to speak with a new form of clarity.”
Of the 12 songs on For Love of Grace & the Hereafter, "Ember" opens with a louche warmup, not typically committed to tape: a sliding run-through of chords without particular direction; a glockenspiel picking out a lead line. And suddenly we’re off, barrelling down the street. The song is an extended hand with a raised eyebrow, inviting its subject to race through the city in love, catching breath in an alley and then going again. Rønnenfelt's "I love you in an ominous way" is a direct moment of clarity, until the rose-tinted melody spills into controlled mayhem.
“Star,” the band’s first single from the record, is a total love song. Its subject awakens its singer and everything around them. It whips the scaffold sheeting; it breathes life. The song, too, is vigorous and vibrant: a sixteenth-note jangle pulse with room for twinkling guitar, for slashy guitar, for soaring, and for tension.
Toward the end of this record sits “Lifetime,” a song that contains an abstracted, seemingly lived character study and an observation of a baby bird hatching from an egg, Rønnenfelt tells the listener to “get ready for a lifetime of beatings.” It’s a line of laughing nihilism that conjures the quartet of hungry young teenagers who started playing hot punk music in small rooms in Copenhagen nearly 20 years ago. In the context of this record, however, a lifetime of beatings sounds like something to be proud of.
In For Love of Grace & the Hereafter, Iceage have found salvation, notably through the throes of true love, both romantic and brotherly. According to the band, “saving grace is found as the spirit combusts and the stars are within reach. It’s an irresistible pull. A harrowing, breakneck, and bardic crossing.” Everything has been leading up to this moment for Iceage. A communal, cathartic collapse, and a full circle moment where contentment and chaos can live in clarity.
