Words: Dana Kats / @danakats13 // Cover Image: Wes Orshoski
“Ten years since their debut album ‘New Brigade’, the fivesome have not stopped mind-boggling fans with their musical brilliance”
If you’re a fan of the obscure, then you undoubtedly have a deep love and appreciation for Iceage. Copehagen’s finest managed to be the soundtrack of our first lockdown having released ‘Lockdown Blues’ in April 2020. If you’re looking for a beacon of hope for 2021, look no further as they are finally returning with their newest single and video ‘The Holding Hand’ – their debut in celebration of signing to their new label Mexican Summer.
The track evokes deep feelings of confusion, discontent and complete fascination from the very first introductory strings. With signature soul-piercing vocals that stretch around you like an enchanted serpent you willingly allow to apply constant pressure on your chest, this song transcends the listener into a reality of delay and distortion that you will never want to step out of.
With magnetising lyricism and the peculiar musical composition which makes them so identifiable, the track seems to echo a hopeful melancholy that will raise the hairs on the back of your neck. It will make you provocatively uncomfortable; enough so, that it can make one feel capable of stepping out of their own skin and into the frontman Elias Bender Rønnenfelt’s carefully composed reality. Nils Gröndahl’s haunting violin is leading the song to climax making the atmosphere like gluttonous self-inflicted torture – the kind you absolutely cannot walk away from.
In his own words about ‘The Holding Hand’, Elias Bender Rønnenfelt states: “The song lives in a slurred world, movements are elastically stretched out and strength is found in weakness while you find it hard to tell the difference between fume and matter. Gently the swaying intensifies, feel it escalate. Reach out for the holding hand, it seems almost within scope now.”
Alongside the release of the single, the fivesome have gone live with the music video which definitely justifies the atmosphere the track expresses – exposing the distorted and exaggerated portraits of the band members. Elias Bender Rønnenfelt, Jakob Tvilling Pless, Johan Surrballe Wieth, Dan Kjær Nielsen are all protagonists in this music video, including the debut of new member Casper Morilla Fernandez.
Directed by Anders Malmberg, he comments the following about his time working with Iceage: “The band has such an amazing and soulful presence, and my aim was to create a cinematic experience around image reflections that would tie in closely to the narrative and the emotional atmosphere of the track, and let the authenticity that the band radiates feel ever present”
If you haven’t stepped in the world of Iceage I suggest you do so immediately as this is probably the closest thing to pure art that you can come in contact with during lockdown. Go stream “The Holding Hand” and indulge in their music video, below.