Far Out Meets: Iceage’s Elias Bender Rønnenfelt discusses new rarities collection
Somehow, it’s been over a decade since Copenhagen’s cult heroes Iceage shared their angst-filled debut album, New Brigade. Since then, they’ve released four more records, including 2021’s Seek Shelter, and now the Danish group are taking a step down memory lane with their new compilation, Shake The Feeling: Outtakes & Rarities 2015-2021.
When they began their journey, Iceage were barely out of school, and a decade of rock ‘n’ roll decadence followed before they had a moment to pause during the pandemic. They’ve been forced to grow up in the public eye and were early victims of cancel culture when The Guardian and Vice accused them of flirting with Nazi imagery in 2013. It was a learning curve for the group, who proudly have a staunch left-wing political ideology, and for many, it was their introduction to the band.
In 2014, they let their music begin to do the talking again with their phenomenal Plowing Into the Field of Love. It arrived before post-punk became everywhere, and although Elias Bender Rønnenfelt feels blasé about its impact, it’s undeniably one of the most influential records of the last ten years.
However, it’s the Beyondless and Seek Shelter era of the band, which their new release celebrates. Rather than releasing a compilation of greatest hits from their journey so far, the Danes are sharing a collection of tracks they’ve built up over this timespan, which they painstakingly left off the records.
Speaking over Zoom to Far Out, frontman Rønnenfelt explains the thinking behind the release: “Just for the simple reason that we realised we were sitting on top of quite a bit of unreleased material that had piled up to a sizable amount. We had a look at the materieal to see if it was worth anything because some stuff wasn’t finished, but we added some things to it and then slammed it together to see if they would kind of coexist with each other, which made a neat little package.”
He elaborates: “They also have their individual reasons for not fitting into those records, and some of them weren’t really finished at the time. Some of them we gave up on, and some were left out in the puzzle because they didn’t fit into the narrative even though they were songs that we loved.”
The record is made up of cuts that blend to create a cohesive body of work, and tracks such as the titular, ‘Shake The Feeling,’ are simply too strong not to be shared for public consumption. Meanwhile, the aptly-titled ‘Lockdown Blues’ was a time-relevant release that didn’t quite fit in with the rest of Seek Shelter.
On the release, they also cover Bob Dylan’s ‘I’ll Keep It With Mine’. Explaining their decision to take on the track, Rønnenfelt admits it was more inspired by Niko’s version but concedes, “I love Bob Dylan. There hasn’t been a heartbreak in my life that he hasn’t been an integral part of the healing process for at least a night or two.”
Meanwhile, the aforementioned ‘Lockdown Blues’ was born out of Rønnenfelt’s frustration as his livelihood was taken away. For the first time in his adult life, the frontman spent considerable time at home, and it wasn’t until he stepped off the conveyor that the singer realised how manic the last decade had been.
“This summer, I had a schedule that’s more akin to what it used to be like before the pandemic. When I was thrown into that kind of schedule, I was like, ‘God is this what I used to do? This is barely human.’ But, I’ve never tried stopping before, and I never tried anything remotely domestic before. I think for everybody’s mental safety, it’s probably not the worst thing for us to have a few years where somebody kind of put a stop to it,” he honestly reveals.
Rønnenfelt admits the intense pacing of the festival season has meant it wasn’t “a summer for reflection”, and he still hasn’t fully worked out exactly how the pandemic has changed him as a person.
Although Seek Shelter was released in 2021, Iceage had recorded it before the world shut down, but the singer has kept himself creatively occupied throughout that time. It’s when Rønnenfelt looks forward to what’s ahead and talks about his future plans that he becomes the most animated. “It’s been fucking exciting going in versatile space lately,” he chirps.
He continues: “I wrote an album of songs that I’m about to record next month on my own. I think writing that project has created a vacuum where the ideas just come out of nowhere and start exploding. In the last month, it’s been interesting because it seems like we’ve had a breakthrough in order to have an idea of where we want to go with things, so it’s exciting times for us.”
Iceage have been friends since they were kids, and the band will remain at the centre of Rønnenfelt’s priorities. However, a solo trip around Europe last year playing impromptu shows inspired him greatly and led to the singer writing this new batch of songs he’s set to record by himself.
He explains: “I was just travelling around with an acoustic guitar, and songs were forming on these travels. They were kind of based around just travelling around playing alone and then finding out that you can essentially write a song on an acoustic guitar the night before and play it the day after. I like the simplicity of that.
“It was very sort of unplanned. I just responded to emails, set up an email account that people could write me that and then everything just came very unexpectedly. I would wherever I was able to and about played churches, private houses and collaborated with orchestras and even ended up in farmhouses.”
Rønnenfelt’s spontaneous trip across Europe, playing to anybody and anywhere, is a testament to the kind of artist he is. He’s solely focused on the music, and it doesn’t matter to him whether it’s in front of 5,000 or 50 people, as long as he’s living experiences which can fuel his songwriting. In the age of social media, and artists having also to be content creators, it’s refreshing to come across a throwback like Rønnenfelt, who has a bohemian mindset not dissimilar from a certain artist who Iceage cover on their new release.
Iceage’s new collection Shake The Feeling: Outtakes & Rarities 2015-2021, is out now.
