The New Iceage

On the brink of insanity with Denmark’s greatest punk band

- Zach Schonfeld

LIKE A LOT OF TEENAGERS, Elias Bender Rønnenfelt spent hours alone in his room listening to music. He was a Danish kid growing up in the new millennium, but the sounds that excited him were American and British, from prior decades. “All sorts of New York no wave bands,” says the now 26-year-old Rønnenfelt. “David Bowie. Crass. Teen Idles.”

One of his favorites: the seminal punk band Richard Hell and the Voidoids. So it was disorienting for Rønnenfelt when Hell, a 68-year-old punk veteran, recently wrote an impassioned essay in praise of Rønnenfelt’s band, Iceage. In it, the veteran imagines himself “as a kid lying in my closed-door room in the dark, listening to this band and getting what I need.” That was weird to read, Rønnenfelt tells while visiting the New York offices of Matador Records in March. “It’s strange,” he adds, “when a voice from your teenage bedroom speaks back at you.”

He and his bandmates—childhood friends Jakob Tvilling Pless (bass), Dan Kjær Nielsen (drums) and Johan Suurballe Wieth (guitar)—were in the city to promote their fourth album, , which has a sound that could bust through to the mainstream. Not that Iceage intended to be limited to a genre. “We never identified as any,” Rønnenfelt says. “It’s important to us never to conform or agree with anyone else’s idea of what we might be.”