Elias Rønnenfelt is a Danish musician and poet, known as the lead singer and lyricist of Iceage. His latest album solo Speak Daggers (2025) was conceived and recorded at home between tours, featuring contributions from The Congos, Erika de Casier, and Fine. The record follows his 2024 debut Heavy Glory and a series of collaborations, including Lucre with Dean Blunt and projects with Jonatan Leandoer96 and Fousheé. 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 wha
