Heavy Glory is the first solo record by Elias Rønnenfelt, who for the past 16 years has been the singer of Iceage, a band he co-founded when he was 16 years old. Heavy Glory is the sound of growing up by throwing oneself into the world, made by someone whose only constant companions have been a pen and a guitar. The album tells tales of inspiration and perseverance in the face of chaos, isolation and excess. Villains are poetic, crocodiles and rats without names or shapes, while banal details evoke a sharp, lived ennui, from the perfume of a urinal to the mere fact of Luton, London’s loneliest airport. The world it describes is a bright mess, and Rønnenfelt is in it. He knows how to be in it.
Heavy Glory was recorded in Copenhagen, in chapters and moments, over the course of a year. Rønnenfelt plays the guitars. Iceage’s Dan Kjær Nielsen plays drums. Forever collaborators including Iceage and Danish ’77 punk godfather Peter Peterdrop drop in, and two songs feature distinctive vocal counterpoints from Joanne Robertson and Fauzia. “I’ve done this a bunch of times,” Rønnenfelt explains, speaking of the process of crafting a long player, “but capturing and crystallizing an album remains a singular ritual, just with different circumstances. We are capturing something that is hard to hold down.”
The circumstances of this record are notable. Its songwriting first took shape in the spring of 2022, during the curious coda of the pandemic, when the world felt neither open nor closed. Rønnenfelt, “sick and tired of not being able to do what I do,” announced to his fans and friends that he would play shows anywhere in Europe, in any venue, to whoever wanted to hear his music. On the road, Rønnenfelt would write songs and play them the next day. These songs, which form the heart of this LP, were designed to be played anywhere, and they had to be: they were christened in forests and living rooms, bookstores and chapels.
Heavy Glory is a record that examines all the things that lovers do, from the most desperate to the most pure. The album’s crooked path is threaded through by a lover. Maybe more than one lover, the timeline shifts constantly—she’s spectral and ever-changing, like the women of Mickey Newbury’s Looks Like Rain or Townes Van Zandt’s Our Mother the Mountain. The lover haunts the record, reappearing and provoking Rønnenfelt, pulling him in and pushing him away.
“Like Lovers Do,” the album’s emphatic opener, pleads with the lover to spin him around “like lovers do.” “Close” describes the line between jealousy and protectiveness. “Unarmed” is a song of surrender. With an energizing steam-engine chug on a drum machine, “Worm Grew a Spine” paints a picture of an “empress” at the blade of opportunism. It is a knotty flash of words and themes reminiscent of the ornate amphetamine jams on Blonde on Blonde, delivered with a certain earned arrogance, “an attempt to show that no one can fuck with me, lyrically speaking.”
“River of Madeleine” is as soft as “Worm” is hard as he harnesses that toughness in the name of preservation, staying up all night to protect his lover’s dreams. “No One Else” litigates the feelings of love that arrive too late, leaving only memories. “Stalker” is an epic third-person story song in the tradition of the murder ballad, describing a woman whose kindness, whose mere existence, results in death. It is total fiction, boiled down from a scrapped novel Rønnenfelt wrote years earlier.
On “Doomsday Childsplay,” a lilting lament with a Warren Ellis-esque violin line obscured by hammered guitar chords, Rønnenfelt tells of “a parasitic high,” but he’s still alive. Rønnenfelt’s fluency and comfort in music creates a sound that wobbles and rocks but never loses its center, both fragile and super tough, and always moving forward. It is dreamy, sketchy, provisional, bombastic, held together by the passion of certainty.
The record closes with two covers. The first, Spacemen 3’s “Sound of Confusion,” is a mission statement of the life Rønnenfelt has found and inherited in music. “Here it comes,” the song famously promises, and flares out into noise. It is a joyful noise, because this life, in all its grit, is the life he chose. A personal anthem since his early teen years, “Sound of Confusion” became a statement that Rønnenfelt would finally make out loud on that journey in the summer of 2022, when he entreated Pete Kember, aka Spacemen 3’s Sonic Boom, to play the song with him at a show in Lisbon.
The second, Townes Van Zandt’s “No Place to Fall,” is a sweet plea, Rønnenfelt’s final invitation to join him on his journey. It is also a waltz, a one-two-three that whirls in a circle. This journey—this story, this record—will repeat and continue. It never stops. These are the circumstances enshrined in ritual through the creation of this album. “Hit the bottle, wash it down, while there’s still time for another round,“ he sings on “Another Round.” Such is Heavy Glory.
