For Love Of Grace & The Hereafter

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<b>“It’s about catching something in the air,” says Elias Bender Rønnenfelt. On their sixth album, the Danish band think fast.</b> Like their punk forebears, Iceage are nothing if not efficient. Why let a song stretch for four minutes when you only need three? And furthermore, why take weeks to record an album when you can wrap up production in one? “The first record was done in three days, the second in five, the third in seven,” vocalist Elias Bender Rønnenfelt tells Apple Music. “And then we expanded to, like, bloody 10 and 14 days with the next couple.” But for <i>For Love of Grace & the Hereafter</i>, their sixth album, the Copenhagen rock outfit reined themselves back in. They ventured north to Silent Studios, located just miles from the Swedish-Norwegian border in the middle of the woods, where they had made 2014’s <i>Plowing Into the Field of Love</i>, and unleashed on their instruments. “It's a means of creating urgency and not dwelling on opinion or an underlying stress that things could fail,” he says. We work when decisions have to be a spur-of-the moment type of thing. It’s about catching something in the air. It’s like you’re conceiving these songs, and there’s kind of one chance.” <i>For Love of Grace & the Hereafter</i> throbs with this immediacy, but nothing about the songs careens too far into chaos. The see-sawing strings on <b>“Salve for Every Sore”</b> are unlikely but gorgeous bedfellows for the rapid-fire drumming and dizzying guitar work; the cascading chords of <b>“Star”</b> hit the ear like a meteor shower in G-major; the xylophone that leads us into <b>“Ember”</b> is shoved aside by the maddening, discordant gallop that shifts into a euphoric chorus. The pace of the album is just as full-throttle as their work ethic—only one song clocks in at over four minutes, and merely two could be described as “slow.” The lyrics also reflect this unfettered, unfiltered approach, in that they never dull the blade of Rønnenfelt’s nihilism (<b>“The Weak”</b>; <b>“Lifetime”</b>), nor his penchant for bleak portraits (<b>“mother-of-pearl”</b>) and gravitation towards gore (blood, marrow, bones, bruises, mutilation, and destruction of the human body make appearances throughout). For Rønnenfelt, the songs can get “aggressive”—he cites <b>“Ember”</b> as an example—but there’s a connection there under the brutal imagery and blitzing instruments. “It’s not really me singing to somebody,” he explains. “It’s kind of like talking to whoever lives it, being like, ‘Yeah, this is gonna be tough, but I love you.’”

via Apple Music