Warming Up To It

“I feel like crap,” Elias Bender Rønnenfelt moans.

It’s about lunchtime, and the jetlagged frontman of Danish punk-rock poster boys Iceage doesn’t sound thrilled to be fielding this phone call.

“I woke up at fucking three in the morning. I’ve been up for ages,” he says.

“We’re staying at some hotel in Coogee Bay; I have no idea why they put us there. I don’t like the beach and I don’t like swimming. But it’s pretty good for nighttime walks, when I wake up at three in the morning. It’s just deserted and it’s nice to go down and listen to the water at night.”

Still, despite his understandable exhaustion, the Copenhagen-bred musician, who formed the band with his friends Johan Surrballe Wieth (guitar), Dan Kjær Nielsen (drums) and Jakob Tvilling Pless (bass) when they were all below drinking age, picks himself up admirably enough to get down to business when the time comes.

The band are currently enjoying (well, kind of  - “there’s a certain kind of crudeness to it,” Rønnenfelt says of our “not very eloquent” population) their maiden journey Down Under in support of forthcoming third studio full-length Plowing Into The Field Of Love. In contrast to their previous two efforts, 2011’s New Brigade and follow-up LP You’re Nothing (2013), Rønnenfelt says, Plowing Into The Field Of Love – both the final product, which clocks in at almost twice the length of its predecessors combined, and its creative process – blew out to be a larger labour of love than they had anticipated.

"Being a little more experienced with songwriting, of course we’re more refined when it comes to creating that open space, which I guess we always wanted, but we didn’t have the skills beforehand to put in more interesting instrumentation and more drama."

“It took a lot of hard work, and the writing process took place over a year, and we put more effort in it than ever before,” Rønnenfelt explains. “It was smoother in the sense that the songs and ideas kind of came to us automatically, thankfully, but it took lots of hard work, and recording the thing itself – we always book way too little time in the studio, to create a bit of stress and urgency, so nobody slept much. It wasn’t exactly a comfortable experience recording the thing, but it shouldn’t be.”

“We didn’t expect the album to be that long,” he reflects of the LP’s running time. “We didn’t really realise that until we recorded the damn thing and looked at the play time, so that was a bit of a surprise. But, being a little more experienced with songwriting, of course we’re more refined when it comes to creating that open space, which I guess we always wanted, but we didn’t have the skills beforehand to put in more interesting instrumentation and more drama.”

Touring, too, has become a more refined undertaking for the now-globally road-experienced band. It’s unsurprising that they’ve made the attempt to get to as many places as possible, given their apparent aversion to sticking around too long on their home turf.

“It’s a tiny place; I mean, you could probably fit Denmark 100 times within Australia, if not more,” Rønnenfelt scoffs. “So nothing’s more than a five-hour drive away, but there’s also not really that many cities that are worth going to, so we haven’t really toured around Denmark, really … anywhere but Denmark.

“There’s lots of interesting stuff happening in Copenhagen,” he continues, “and there’s one other city where there’s a few interesting things going on, and that’s about a five-hour, four-hour drive away, and there’s a third one, which kind of sucks, but it’s close to the others so you might as well go there, and that’s pretty much it when it comes to playing for a band like us, because we don’t really have any wider commercial appeal there. I mean, we tried to go to, like, a small fishermen’s town to play, once, and one guy showed up.

“He ended up staying with us and driving us to the station the next day. We’re actually friends with that guy now.”

While Rønnenfelt can probably expect Australian audiences to give them a better showing than that, the same can’t be said from the punters’ perspective – since Plowing Into The Field Of Love is still a couple of weeks away and Iceage aren’t ones to bother digging up old material, there’s little chance of local fans getting treated to many (or, worst-case, any) classic favourites.

“We’re not gonna play any old songs – we stopped doing that – so the audience cannot expect to really know that much of the material,” Rønnenfelt  says.

“I guess what I’m just trying to say is that I can’t do these old songs; I feel detached from them … songs from the first album, some of them were written when I was fucking seventeen."

“We just grew sick of the old songs, I guess. I mean, if I were to see a band, I would prefer to see the band doing whatever they’ve felt and doing material that’s still relevant to the emotions they’re feeling now, instead of… I just feel like I’m trying to dig up some ghosts when I play these old songs now.”

He’s unapologetic about that fact too, balking slightly at the (admittedly loaded) suggestion that, being their first trip to the country, it’s possibly a bit cold to deny fans songs they’ve never even had the chance to hear.

“We’ve been doing only new songs for quite a while; before even any songs from the new record came out there was… a lot of people were kind of upset and annoyed with it, but any smart person should be able to see that these new songs are much better,” Rønnenfelt says. “I guess what I’m just trying to say is that I can’t do these old songs; I feel detached from them … songs from the first album, some of them were written when I was fucking seventeen. To sing a song like New Brigade… I mean, playing a five-year-old song called New Brigade, that’s kind of ridiculous, isn’t it?

“I mean, I guess it depends on what kind of band you are – I wouldn’t go watch Bruce Springsteen do his new songs. But we’re not rock dinosaurs, so we don’t have that kind of duty to do that, I guess. We’re still in some kind of artistic progression, so if this early in our creative career – well, career is a bad word – we’ve already started becoming nostalgic about our old material, that would be like a ball and chain around our feet, I think.”

That said, he concedes that the band feel better overall about the songs on Plowing Into The Field Of Love than they ever did about their earlier material.

“With the past albums, we almost started writing songs immediately after finishing the albums, because we very quickly grew unsatisfied with the album, but this one we were actually pretty pleased with,” he says. “So we haven’t started writing yet; I have no idea where to turn next.”

It could be the dawn of a new Iceage.