Photo by Ira Rønnenfelt
Elias Rønnenfelt is the kind of rock star we don’t see much of nowadays, and not just because the “star” part of the equation depends on the metric we’re using. There is, after all, some air between being celestially famous, being almost famous, and being mostly famous amongst certain cultural subsets. In Rønnenfelt’s case, his fanbase is largely made up of Danes, Germans (Berlin), Australians (Melbourne), Paul Weller skinheads, Americans who can name either two members of the Bad Seeds or one Total Control song, Vietnam fans who never bought a Preoccupations album, cis hairdressers, genderfluid tattooists, closeted Swans fans, boho astrologists, male-identifying Dum Dum Girls groupies, amphetamine goths, ghosts, vampires, exes, enablers, and pretty much all the other good and decent people in the world who wake up every morning asking themselves how they’re going to best reenact the video for “Free Falling.”
Still, setting aside that male rock stardom itself is currently pretty much the purview of Dave Grohl and the guy from the 1975 exclusively, Rønnenfelt — with his model good looks and hair that seems to moisten itself before your eyes — is a rare bird in the rock and roll landscape. Thoughtful without retreating into self-effacement, affably pretentious but not so arrogant that he stints on the sharing of credit or pretends to know what he doesn’t; Rønnenfelt harkens back to the kind of frontman who’d be on the covers of NME and Melody Maker in the ‘80s, back when they were broadsheets with a different, completely brilliant and ludicrously coiffed Ian every week. Even considering the current rocker intelligentsia is a couple of rungs lower than Grohl and 1975 dude, the fact that Rønnenfelt knows how to dress himself makes him a near anachronism. And sure, Nick Cave and the National still “rock suits” but the National never got the memo that a button-down and jacket should make you look like a rakish scumbag, not a scotch distillery rep. As for Nick Cave, I have it on good authority that he hasn’t actually worn a stitch of clothes in twenty-five years; that’s just what his skin looks like.
So there’s just Elias Rønnenfelt, chain-smoking in the Los Angeles sun with a glimmer in his eyes as bright as the pristine whiteness of his collar and the grease reflection of his hair (which seemed to self-separate around said shining eyes like something out of a Hugo Boss ad), chugging a can of domestic beer, and saying stuff like “there are worse things than angels.” Even in an hour-long interview touching on questions of disillusionment, endings, and the limitations of faith, the man exudes a timelessness through his swank that’s almost enough to make one believe in stuff.
As was traditional back when everything ran on pneumatic energy and the whims of the English press, the singer of Iceage has — after five studio albums with the band he formed as a teenager in 2008 — released a solo album. Before there’s any mass hurling of oneselves out of high windows amongst the post-punk 28-38 bracket, let me assure you all that Iceage has not broken up. In fact, “Iceage have been really in fruition since I finished this record,” Rønnenfelt will say, when that inevitable question comes up. “I think by having a vessel to outlive my stripped-back balladry it made it so much more apparent that I have possibly the best rock and roll band in the world right over here.”
“I’m just fumbling towards writing songs that feel like they have a reason to exist in the world. I don’t have any calculated end goal for what I’m going for.”
It’s reductionist to say that the tradition of “front person making a solo album” typically falls into one of three camps. The “fuck you, I can make it on my own” crossover attempt, the “don’t worry, guys. I just got this mini-Korg, but I’ll be back soon” trifle, or the “guys, I just got divorced. And an acoustic guitar. Don’t wait up” soul exorcism. If that’s true (and it is), Heavy Glory is mainly the latter, with just enough of the non-alienating experimentalism of the middle option (along with a light touch of Dylan & the Band hootenanny collaboration) to stave off a band intervention. Across the album’s twelve tracks (ten originals and one cover each of Spacemen 3 and Townes Van Zandt songs), Rønnenfelt goes from spartan folk ‘n’ janky drum machine to being fully drenched in strings. Nearly all of it is in the service of describing how love breaks down.
At one point of our conversation, I complimented the singer for how his litany cataloging of personal failings was comprehensive but avoided the singer-songwriter trope of serial infidelity. I was genuinely proud for him.
At the praise, Rønnenfelt gives a faintly pained half smile, before saying “give that song ‘No One Else’ another listen.”
Photo by Ilaria Ieie.
When I respond, “oh ok gotcha,” the singer gives me the universal look of “next question.” As he will do later in the interview, when I do my sniveling journalist duty and ask him point blank if he’s still seeing Sky Ferreira, the alt-pop demi-star who duetted with the Iceage singer on Beyondless’ excellent tentpole single, “Pain Killer,” and with whom, for a number of years, Rønnenfelt could be found woozily cavorting with the darkest corner of one coastal after party or another. The two were, in their fashion, in certain circles with certain shared proclivities, iconic. While I prefer to keep my prying and petty speculation far behind the subject of gossip’s back like a normal person, the gig is the gig so I had to ask if the couple were still together. Rønnenfelt gave a second-long pause, which felt appropriately eternal, before giving a firmly polite “no.”
Not sure how I missed an entire track of lines like “Trust is a gift retracted if the beneficiary don’t take custody… When I said I wanted nothing, that’s not really what I meant / Her kisses truly sweet like no one else / but I couldn’t keep my fingers to myself / I couldn’t keep my fingers to myself” the first time around. Though I’m not sure that there’s a fault to be found in not taking any one song explicitly.
“A lot of the record is very earnestly informed and taken from real life, and the highs and lows and troubles and goodness that comes within that. And it’s written from various stations and stages of relationships,” Rønnenfelt says. “So in that sense, yes, some of it is very true to life. But the goal hasn’t been to just write down what happens, you know, in a one-to-one form, laying it out there as clear as possible. In the end, it’s also about making a worthwhile piece of art rather than just a diary entry.”
Perhaps, also, it was the proximity that “No One Else” has to “Stalker,” one of the two tracks on the album where the album’s cast of characters extend past the character of Elias himself. “Stalker” does so as a Pulp-esque narrative, which the singer describes as “a complete fiction, based on a failed novel,” whereas, later on the record, Rønnenfelt uses “Soldier Song” as a not-so-banal-banality-of-evil mediation on whatever rhetorical pretzels any war apologist might be twisting themselves into in order to sleep at night on any given day. If these two tracks are character studies, they hardly constitute a defense for missing the plaintive nature of the album’s sole explicit admission of any sin greater than a habit of indulging habits. Amidst even the two cover songs and the non-fiction pulp fiction of “Worm Grew A Spine,” “Stalker” and “Soldier Song” are the only times on the album where Rønnenfelt’s heart cedes the spotlight.
Rønnenfelt has the kind of voice I like; that of a non-singer who doesn’t let that stupid detail stop them. Not flat or off per se, but still carried more by insistence than nature. While punk formalized that kind of hubris being allowed, it too is a tradition going back at least as far as Dylan. Even if it was then a bit dormant in popular culture until Richard Hell and Bon Scott got their foots in the door, and then it exploded, there’s still a charm to the sound of someone deciding to be what they want to be. While the question that led to it was about Spacemen 3 and Christ iconography (the album’s cover is listed as “Sound of Confusion” though its actual name is “Walkin’ With Jesus,” though—as the song is performed with Peter “Sonic Boom” Kember, who was actually in Spacemen 3, and would therefore have a better idea of his own song’s title than I would—who the fuck knows), Rønnenfelt’s answer about his religious upbringing indicates plenty.
After talking about how his father’s side of the family was “hardcore Catholic,” with his grandfather instilling a very real fear of damnation and Elias’ father being “the black sheep” who instilled in his son a bit of agnosticism, Rønnenfelt says, “I remember being quite small and getting a habit before going to bed of talking to Jesus and to God about everything I did that day—not directly to Jesus and God, but to the possibility of them existing—of all the sins that I committed during that day just to say like, ‘Hey, if you really exist, I know I stole this thing or I did this sinful act so, like, please have an understanding. Don’t put me in hell.’ Just to be on the safe side, you know? And I think that created a habit of talking to myself because I wasn’t really talking to Jesus. I was having a dialogue. And later on, when my grandfather died, who was kind of the Catholic paternal figure of the family, I got involved with the priest and ceremony and was an altar boy for that, and that was the moment of being like ‘Is there a sense of belonging in the church here? Is this something I could pursue?’ And then punk happens. And I was like, ‘Well, fuck all that.’”
Besides the obvious thread between a child laying out all his sins to a potential Jesus and a young singer laying out all his sins for a potential audience (or potential idea of “art”), there’s also how Rønnenfelt says “then punk happens.” The use of the present tense to describe punk happening, as told by someone who was roughly seventeen in 2008, testifies to an almost feral innocence.
That innocence comes up again as we discuss the album’s influences, with Rønnenfelt saying, “I’m just fumbling towards writing songs that feel like they have a reason to exist in the world. I don’t have any calculated end goal for what I’m going for. It’s influenced by a plethora of music traditions but I didn’t set the particular ones that would end up influencing it. I prefer to try to remain a bit naive as to which is coming from where. So it feels genuine and immediate to me.”
Photo by Jonas Bang
For all the skill in which he articulates his songwriting process as though he were either an arch modernest subverting the listener’s expectations with a complex turn of a phrase (at one point describing his lyric writing as having “a certain sense of cruelty” to it) or, alternately, his naivete was something he had to work at like some sort of modern primitive, one suspects that there is something far more pure at work here. He describes his lyrics, accurately, as “voluptuous,” but the Rimbausian sophistication is belied by his telling of performing “Sound of Confusion/Walkin’ With Jesus” with Kemper, at the release party for Heavy Glory.
“We sang ‘Sound of Confusion’ and I started tearing up as I was singing the lyrics,” he says, “just because it felt like the words and soul of this song rang true to a part of myself; a feeling of being down and out that I had lived throughout a large portion of my life.”
Marvelous as Spacemen 3 are, there’s something additionally touching about this admission; something earnestly touching about Denmark’s second most famous depressive punk poet being so moved by performing the ‘80s drone-rock “Too Much Junkie Business,” and his conveying that sentiment in the language of a Chicago bluesman. There is something classic in how Rønnenfelt affectations are so effortful as to become guileless. With the result being a knowing-not-knowing-and-back-again vulnerability that makes gold out of corn, and makes blues signifiers into actual blues. Because, for all the wryness communicated in both his verbosity and his smile, he may be pure (but for all the drugs and sleeping around). Clever as he is, and as clever as he elides, Elias Rønnenfelt exists almost outside of irony. He may be the last rock and roll frontman (who isn’t, you know, an actual moron) to do so.
