Iceage announce sixth album ‘For Love of Grace & the Hereafter’ out May 29 via Mexican Summer, sharing urgent new single ‘Ember’
Eighteen years into a career built on controlled collapse, Iceage are back with a record that refuses to slow down. The Danish quintet announced their sixth studio album, For Love of Grace & the Hereafter, on April 7, confirming a May 29 release via Mexican Summer. Alongside the announcement, they shared “Ember,” the album’s opening track and second single, backed by a music video directed by the band and Ira Rønnenfelt. The album marks the group’s first full-length of new material since 2021’s Seek Shelter.
The rollout began quietly in March when the band resurfaced with “Star,” their first new music in five years. That single signaled a return to something leaner and more direct. “Ember” makes the intention explicit. The track opens with shimmering acoustic guitar and harmonizing voices before detonating into atonal screams and disjointed chords. Vocalist Elias Rønnenfelt delivers his signature deadpan monologue over the tension, anchoring the track’s central refrain: “I love you in an ominous way.” It is a line that compresses the band’s entire aesthetic into six words, tenderness sharpened to a point.
Recorded at the Same Studio as ‘Plowing Into the Field of Love’
The band recorded For Love of Grace & the Hereafter at Silence Studio, a modest house in rural Sweden near the Norwegian border. The choice of location is deliberate. It is the same studio where Iceage cut 2014’s Plowing Into the Field of Love, widely considered one of their most vital records, and the only studio they have returned to across their entire catalogue. The album was produced and mixed by the band alongside longtime collaborator Nis Bysted. “The songs needed to be immediate, urgent, raw, and fast,” frontman Rønnenfelt said in a statement. “We wanted to try to shed any unnecessary weight. Catching outlets of energy is what excites us the most.”
Press materials describe the album as Iceage’s “tightest to date, even glossy at times, but not tight enough to dull its pulse,” containing wordless howls, nastily detuned riffs that bend into harmony, breakdowns, handclaps, and a chaotic choral break seemingly played on pennywhistles. The full 12-track listing runs: “Ember,” “Match Head Girl,” “The Weak,” “No Fear,” “Salve for Every Sore,” “mother-of-pearl,” “Tender Blades,” “1835,” “Star,” “Lifetime,” “Holy Water,” and “True Blue.”
Rønnenfelt’s Solo Work Adds New Dimension to the Return
The five years between Seek Shelter and this announcement have not been quiet for Rønnenfelt personally. Since 2021, he has released two solo albums, Heavy Glory (2024) and Speak Daggers (2025), as well as lucre (2025), a collaborative EP with Dean Blunt. That body of work extended his literary, fragmentary approach to songwriting into even stranger terrain, and its influence is audible in the way For Love of Grace & the Hereafter is being framed: not as a band treading familiar ground, but as five people returning to a specific place with new eyes and sharper tools.
The album’s press materials describe it as “the sum total of inspirations, shared openly in the name of playing and playing’s pleasures,” with no curated palette of influence and no prescribed sound. Given what Iceage have consistently been, that is not a modest claim. It is a statement of intent from a band that has spent nearly two decades finding new ways to almost fall apart and hold together at once. For Love of Grace & the Hereafter is out May 29 via Mexican Summer.
