Iceage have returned with the passion-filled new single, ‘Star’ – marking their first new music in five years.
Shared today (Wednesday March 11), the track is the first from the Danish quintet – formed of vocalist Elias Rønnenfelt, guitarist Johan Suurballe Wieth, drummer Dan Kjær Nielsen, guitarist Casper Morilla Fernandez, and bassist Jakob Tvilling Pless – since their ‘Seek Shelter’ album, which dropped in 2021.
The track is described by the band as a love song, and sees them combine their signature grit with a new, animated element. In the lyrics, they capture the overwhelming feeling of love, and compare it to a dying star.
“You’ve got me dying like a star/ Centuries apart, sunlike in the battered sky,” Rønnenfelt sings in the chorus. “You’ve got me dying like a star/ Europe into a studded veil.”
The song also comes with an accompanying video directed by Thinh T. Petrus Nguyen. Check it out below.
While the band have not shared any music since their 2021 album, until now, the frontman’s first solo outing, ‘Heavy Glory’, arrived in 2024, and he spoke to NME at the time about how he was inspired by musical travels across Europe, where he would write songs in the day, then road-test them at shows at night.
“I’m out here on my own with a guitar. I can write something, play it right away, and it doesn’t have to be rehearsed. There was freedom in that, realising that the road from writing to putting it in front of people is extremely short,” he said.
“That’s the common thing for all of the songs on the record – they were meant to be able to function when stripped back to basics. Iceage always did that as well. We always played new material before it was anywhere near recorded. We took a perverse enjoyment in playing whole shows of unknown songs.”
Iceage’s ‘Seek Shelter’, arrived in May 2021 after being previewed with singles ‘The Holding Hand’, ‘Vendetta’ and ‘Shelter Song’.
NME declared the record “by far the boldest thing the Danes have ever made, but also an album that still feels distinctly theirs” in a four-star review upon its release.
“The fierce 90-second punk songs of their early days might now have morphed into vast stadium-rock anthems, but Iceage remain as razor-sharp as ever,” the review read.
