Ten years in and Iceage is just getting started. The Danish foursome’s latest release, Beyondless, keeps time with Plowing into the Field of Love, their breakthrough in sonic complexity from 2014. While that record introduced a more emotionally and instrumentally varied band, the Iceage of Beyondless sound downright unhinged–a suite of inebriated horns provides another welcome wrinkle to Plowing’s viola and mandolin. Bassist Jakob Tvilling Pless and drummer Dan Kjær Nielsen’s pummeling rhythm section directs the often lurching, demented proceedings, while Johan Surrballe Wieth’s lead guitar erupts with intensity, raging psychedelic, or spinning sharply out into the ether from track to track. Since their debut, frontman Elias Bender Rønnenfelt’s singing has evolved from dead-eyed to dead-behind-the-eyes, infecting the band’s fuller sound with a burned out vigor.
“Thieves Like Us,” track seven, encapsulates this feral vitality. The song opens with a sliding guitar lick that leads a countrified, Libertines bounce in and out of Rønnenfelt’s gleeful ramblings. And that’s before the haunting piano twinkles in like some demonic music box. Elsewhere, “Under the sun” staggers doggedly beneath a haunting Nick Cave-style monologue from Rønnenfelt, with Wieth’s guitar shrieking and slipping over the relentless beat. Throughout, Nielsen’s drumming turns ordinary fills into turbo-charged engines, driving the band forward, even as the ship seems to be heeling over.
This deft balance between immense musical power and sputtering fragility that Iceage maintains on Beyondless allows the band to take chances. The penultimate song, “Showtime,” opens slowly with winding, breeze-y feedback and what sounds like birds chirping. Sporadic, hammering drums guide a pinched trumpet to the forefront just in time for Rønnenfelt’s doomed show biz spiel to begin. This slurred caricature of a cynical, raving troubadour is equal parts Cave and Pissed Jeans’ Matt Korvette at his most melodramatic and deadpan. Upping the tension, the band breaks into a drunken carnival waltz, skillfully merging the instrumentation with the narrative’s brain-splattering climax. As “Showtime” plays itself out over rapid mandolin, the band’s transformation from chugging, muted, post-punk moaners to proficient genre explorers seems to be well under way.
Indeed, Beyondless truly breaks open a track earlier, on “Take it all.” The song builds along a sliding, shining guitar line and military snares, eventually overwhelmed and obscured by an atmospheric beam of searing, cloud-splitting strings. It sounds like The Verve under the influence of Wu Lyf, and the effect is something like sky-gazing during the rapture. As Rønnenfelt croaks “take it all away from me” alongside a persistent tambourine, he seems to be gratefully losing his grip in service to his band’s ascendance.
“Hurrah” starts Beyondless on creaking, drawn-out strings and gurgling bass before loping into stride with agile, gleaming guitars and bright, detonating drums. The vocals are all disaffected rock ‘n’ roll swagger: you can practically see the sneer on Rønnenfelt’s face as “‘cause we can’t stop killing / and we never stop killing / and we shouldn’t stop killing / hurrah” rolls out of him. This is the sort of sonic tableau that Matt Berninger would’ve been steeling himself to scream over on early National records. That band turned a corner with 2005’s Alligator, fusing the moments of mania and tense quiet from their initial releases into the grandiose adult angst that resulted in at least two more great albums. With Beyondless, Iceage seems to have crossed a similar threshold.