For the last 16 years, Elias Rønnenfelt has fronted Danish punk band Iceage. Over five albums, the Copenhagen quintet’s nihilistic, battering-ram rock has thawed and flourished into more complex and ornate arrangements; hear for example their latest album, 2021’s Seek Shelter, produced by Peter Kember of psych rock legends Spacemen 3.

In the mid-2010s, Rønnenfelt stepped out with a couple of albums under the moniker Marching Church. The project began as an outlet for his solo experiments but grew into a full band. Now, he’s once again ventured out from Iceage, this time under his own name. Heavy Glory, his debut solo album, tells tales of inspiration, perseverance, and love in the face of the chaotic wilds of the world. Harmonicas, strings, and acoustic guitars induce mild sunbaked psychedelia, conjuring images of backpacked ramblers and drifters. Though Rønnenfelt tailored Heavy Glory’s 12 songs to work with voice and guitar, he later enlisted other musicians to flesh them out including Iceage bandmate Dan Kjær Nielsen on drums, Joanne Robertson and Fauzia on additional vocals, and ‘70s punk icon Peter Peter.

Rønnenfelt began writing Heavy Glory in the summer of 2021. Though pandemic restrictions had begun to lift, touring was still difficult for bands but much easier for individuals. He put out a call on Instagram, along with a public email, seeking solo bookings for anywhere in Europe. After sifting through hundreds of emails and saying yes to as many invitations as possible, he spent the next year or so performing in churches, bookstores, private homes, bars, forests – anywhere that would have him.

Northern Transmissions spoke with Rønnenfelt about trekking through Europe alone to play anywhere he had an audience, Heavy Glory being called “soft,” the music video for his first single “No One Else,” and why he chose to cover Townes Van Zandt’s “No Place to Fall” on the album.

Northern Transmissions: Did playing anywhere people wanted to hear your music when the pandemic lockdowns were partially lifted satisfy your need to get moving and be out in the world?

Elias Rønnenfelt: Yeah. If anything, it restored my faith a little bit in humans. There’s a lot of very hospitable, decent people out there. There’s a sort of desperation that comes from being out on your own, so you rely on the kindness of strangers every now and again. People are all right.

NT: Were you also crashing with a lot of these people?

ER: I had a few strange living situations, but mostly I would be in hotels.

NT: When you say strange, do you just mean unconventional, or did kind of dodgy things happen?

ER: Well, in Hungary, I was living in what clearly was somebody’s recently dead family member’s apartment. But otherwise, I don’t remember anything being that sketchy.

NT: How did your day-to-day experience at this time give rise to the themes and characters that you sing about on the album, these desperate, pure lovers who will do anything for (or to) each other?

ER: A lot of life shit goes the way it goes and informs the songs, and yeah, there is an overarching theme of love in various stages weaved through the album, but it wasn’t very much informed by what happened on the road itself. Writing for me is a lot of confronting and staring into a blank page, notreally being aware of what I’m trying to express. I think being out there [on the road] kind of provided a very living, palpable space for that, and at times an inescapable loneliness. I don’t see me writing any batch of songs other than exactly these under these circumstances.

NT: What revelations about performing or songwriting did you have from touring this way? Were there any unexpected challenges or liberties with making this album yourself? What surprised you about the process?

ER: It was the first time I went out by myself in this way, and usually, when I go out with Iceage, we’re a unit, and you got your gang to comfort you, but it’s a bit more of a lonely endeavour traveling by yourself like that.

I found out you could write a song, and you wouldn’t have to rehearse it with everyone. You just write it and play it. With Iceage, I’m writing with multiple sounds and layers from the get-go. These songs were meant to be able to work stripped of everything but me and the guitar. Later, I would start hearing sounds on top of what I’d written, and it became a search to find out where the songs needed to reach and what was needed. So, I brought in lots of collaborators, but it was definitely a goal not to oversaturate the record. I wanted it to be sort of bare.

NT: Not overthink it, even.

ER: Yeah. In everything I do, I make an almost conscious effort not to overthink shit. It’s kind of the devil. You can get lost in choices, so I strive to get led by gut feeling and knowing when to stop.

NT: A lot of publications have referred to the new songs as you softening compared to Iceage. How do you feel about that?

ER: I appreciate you raising the question because even Iceage have been accused of flirting with something softer at times. People associate something that is harder with the ability to press down on distortion pedal and play uptempo. But this music has quite a heavy gravity at times, and it’s certainly not easy listening as such. People hear strings or acoustic guitars, and then they say that, but I think it’s quite tough in places, this record. But certainly vulnerable.

NT: To associate music with strings and horns and acoustic as being soft or something with a lot of fuzz and distortion as hard is a very emotionless read. It strips the emotion out of it. You’re just associating it according to how the music itself sounds, not the emotional timbre of it all.

ER: Yeah, and people think they know me for one thing or a certain kind of sound. But I mean, call it whatever the fuck you want. I’m good with soft, too.

NT: The video for “No One Else” to me is like dealing with two different types of isolation: literal, in the open plains of Wyoming, and more psychological, anonymous in a sea of strangers and transient tourists in Vegas. What can you tell me about the concept behind this video?

ER: I was traveling through the States this summer, and I bought a cheap camcorder. We had almost no budget to do all these videos for the album. I bought a shooting target and some medical gauze in a Walmart, and there was all this beautiful landscape we were riding through. I think the press release said something about isolation, but I don’t think I’m a very isolated human being. The songs are very much informed by a rich sense of life that goes on around me. I wasn’t trying to illustrate a lone wolf in a big open landscape. I was just traveling around in a car and bought a blindfold that looked kinda sick.

NT: Do you remember when or what your life was like when you first heard “Sound of Confusion” or “No Place to Fall,” when those songs first grabbed you? What is it about those songs that spoke to you all those years ago, in your circumstances at the time?

ER: Spacemen 3 I’ve been a big fan of since I was a young teenager. Townes Van Zandt – I remember the first long U.S. tour we did with Iceage, we had this tour manager from Texas who was kind of a rough guy with a heart of gold, but we were touring in this fucking piece of shit van in the American south in the summer, and the air conditioning in the car had broken down, so it was unbelievably hot, and all our tour manager would play was Townes Van Zandt, and we fucking hated it. We were like, “What is this miserable cowboy music we have to listen to every day in this unbelievably uncomfortable and hot van?” But he planted a seed, and Townes Van Zandt is somebody I really cherish. I was playing a bookstore in Paris, and the girl who owned the bookstore was like, “You have to play ‘No Place to Fall’ tonight, or I won’t have you,” so I was like, “Then I’ll play it.” So those two covers were informed by travels. That’s part of the reason I thought they had a place on the record. They grew with me when the other songs were being birthed.

Pre-order Heavy Glory by Elias Rønnenfelt HERE