Danish punks Iceage announces upcoming album, Seek Shelter, out May 7 via Mexican Summer and Escho.

Iceage have announced their upcoming fifth LP, Seek Shelter, which sees the band pushing their sound to new directions.

The album, released via Mexican Summer, enlists Spacemen 3’s Mike Kember AKA Sonic Boom for production duties (marking the first time an outside producer is brought in alongside longtime producer Nis Nysted) and an additional guitarist, Casper Morilla Fernandez.

Vocalist Elias Bender RΓΈnnenfelt, a fan of Kember’s space rock band Spacemen 3 formed in 1982, explains the collaboration,

β€œIt was one of those things that just reverberated with my being. We wanted a partner that had some noise that we didn’t have, more a wizard than a producer. We thought he’d be that kind of wizard for us, and we were right β€” he came in with a truckload of strange equipment that we’d never seen before.”

Recorded in the dilapidated vintage studio of Namouche in Lisbon on rainy days, Seek Shelter embraces conventional songwriting structures.

The band recently released their latest single ‘Gold City’, a record which sounds like ‘the road, a desert mission under a blazing sun.’

The single follows previously released singles ‘The Holding Hand’, ‘Shelter Song’, and ‘Vendetta’, the latter of which is a groovy tune that blends electronic beats with blues signatures.

It is reported that The Lisboa Gospel Collective joined the band for two tracks on the final day in the studio.

Says RΓΈnnenfelt,

β€œWriting a song is like trying to find a space where you can make something that’s been riled up and down through the years feel like it belongs to your present moment. It’s all just scaffolding that you can project something onto.”

His lyricism sings of shelter, of tranquil affections that threaten to combust, and of a limp-wristed god with a cavalcade of devotees in search of relief. His expressionist imagery consistently hinges on the divine, a natural result of his desire to take a kernel of ordinary emotion and, as he explains, β€œblow it up like a balloon.”

He explains of the songwriting process,

β€œI set a time just to make sure that all the lyrics are written from the same mindset, it becomes an amalgamation of ideas and impressions of things that you’ve been provoked by or had to live through. You end up with something that is a rough, blurry perspective of what that period of time was like, a mishmash of personal struggle that is shaded throughout by a world that seems more transparent in its inherently cruel ways.”

Iceage was formed in 2008 by members Elias Bender RΓΈnnenfelt, Jakob Tvilling Pless, Johan Surrballe Wieth and Dan KjΓ¦r Nielsen as young teens in Copenhagen. Their 2011 debut, New Brigade, displays the Danish teens’ sound of post-punk, hardcore, and no wave.

Their next record, 2021’s You’re Nothing, was hard, fast and raw before softening their hardest edges on subsequent albums, Plowing Into the Field of Love and Beyondless.

Seek Shelter Tracklist

  1. Shelter SongΒ 
  2. High & Hurt
  3. Love Kills Slowly
  4. VendettaΒ 
  5. Drink Rain
  6. Gold City
  7. Dear Saint Cecilia
  8. The Wider Powder Blue
  9. The Holding Hand