There are bands that you can compare to other bands and then there’s Iceage. The Danish alternative outfit (they don’t like to be categorised, so that’s the best we can do) have made everything that they touch uniquely theirs, which hasn’t differed since the release of their debut album New Brigade exactly a decade ago. Announcing their signing to new label Mexican Summer today, the outfit have shared a fresh cut that conforms to that trend.
‘The Holding Hand’ has been described by frontman Elias Bender Rønnenfelt as a song that “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”. Rønnenfelt continues: “Gently the swaying intensifies, feel it escalate. Reach out for the holding hand, it seems almost within scope now.”
It’s the first track to be released since last year’s pandemic anthem ‘Lockdown Blues’, and will hopefully form part of Iceage’s forthcoming fifth studio album. When we spoke to the band last year, they exclaimed that finishing touches were being made on the record, “and we’re dying to deliver this jagged beast that we’ve birthed to whichever curious ears that may be out there. Alas, the restraints of COVID-19 are making it so it’ll see the light of day a little later than what we had hoped, but in the meantime it is brewing, boiling, cooking.”
The video for their new clip was directed by Anders Malmberg, who described Iceage’s presence as “amazing and soulful”, and his aim as “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”.
The forthcoming album from Iceage will follow on from 2018’s Beyondless.
