During my time talking with Elias Rønnenfelt, I sometimes felt like I was witnessing a performance in miniature. The singer and songwriter gesticulated with an intensity that I recognized from watching videos of Iceage, the great Copenhagen punk band he has fronted since 2008, when he was still a teenager. At other moments, he fidgeted like a kid stuck in detention. He wore his suit loose, with the cuff buttons undone, and answered my questions with the kind of thoughtfulness that might be expected from an artist who has dedicated their life to music.

We were speaking at the Waverly Diner in the West Village on the occasion of what was then his forthcoming debut solo record under his government name. Now out into the world on the Copenhagen label Escho, Heavy Glory sees the artist doubling down on some of the rootsier impulses that he has explored with both Iceage and his side project, Marching Church. Built with acoustic guitar, the record is the result of a string of solo shows the artist played throughout Europe in 2021. It’s quite possibly his most intimate work to date. Our conversation—and the new album—is below.

So, you’ve been looking for guitars today. Is this for an upcoming tour?

Elias Rønnenfelt: Eventually, but I've been borrowing Johan from Iceage’s guitar for all my shows, and it's about time I get my own. I've been running around all day and it just has left me very confused. 

Are you hitting vintage spots? Guitar center? 

I went to Guitar Center, I think I went to eight stores, everything Lower Manhattan has to offer, really. An interesting one was next to the Chelsea Hotel. The old guy working there was cursing me out and accusing me of lying about something. 

That's how you know the gear's good, though, if there's a surly old dude working who's kind of an asshole. 

Yeah, I mean, half the guitars there didn't even have strings on them. One guitar was kind of nice, but I was chased out before I got a feel for it. 

So, how are you feeling about this new music being out in the world? 

I feel good—a song came out today. Leading up to it, I wasn't sure if I was going to feel anything, but now it's this feeling of being a mother bird who pushed the baby out of the nest and it seems to fly alright. It's kind of strange because there's all this build up with the endless streams of emails that lead up to this thing and then finally it just comes down to a push of a button. You realize that you're kind of helpless at this point. It's supposed to live its own life and you can't really do much. People were stopping me on the street today that heard the song, when I was going between guitar shops. That was nice, tangible proof that these things are more than just numbers. 

Are there different kinds of nerves that come with your name being connected to a project, not a band name or a project name? 

With Iceage or anything else I've done, we've always been very protective and done the utmost to maintain all senses of control. I guess with my name, the name my mother gave me, my passport name, it is strange to have agents and numbers and shit attached to your name, but I guess that kind of goes for anything in society, right? I think there's an awareness and a protectiveness.

Are these songs that couldn't have been Marching Church songs or Iceage songs? Is there something that delineates this project for you? 

I think it’s just that I couldn't be fucked to figure some new cool moniker or splash two words together and have that be it. This record came from traveling by myself and playing by myself, so it kind of made sense that this was a project that was tied to just me rather than building it up to be a collaborative band project or something.

What were those travels like? Was that a new way of touring for you? 

At the time it was the only way of touring. It was 2021, the second summer of Covid. The world wasn't really in fit conditions to house a band like Icage. I felt wary about sitting around another summer waiting for something to happen. I created a public email and said I'd play anywhere and then kind of did. I just said yes to anything that was possible and I played bookstores and private homes and churches and the middle of forests and all around Europe. Some of the songs just sprung from being on your own and realizing that you could write a song and play it the next day without rehearsing it with anyone. It's all meant to be able to be performed stripped back from all that since came on it. 

Were you playing with an acoustic guitar? 

Yeah. 

Obviously, that's a very different performative energy than singing for Iceage. Was that feeding back into how you were thinking about these songs or how you were writing them? Were you able to almost embody a different kind of songwriter? 

Well, not a different kind of songwriter, it kind of spawns out of the same place essentially, but Iceage is kind of like a beast in its own nature. Iceage has a tendency to sort of explode upon an audience. It doesn't really need to draw people in because it comes at people. Playing acoustically, you find that you rely on intimacy and for people to shut the fuck up and create a space where where silence is valued. That's never something I thought about at an Iceage gig, but after a while it dawned on me that if you can create a space where you have a mutual dedication to the silence, then the silence in between the notes becomes an instrument in the room itself. Yeah, it’s written as I was figuring out how to do it this way. And then sometimes you also need to figure out how you demand some kind of attention when it isn't given on its own. 

I assume you're playing in much smaller rooms, but, still, it's a different dynamic with people when it's just you and the guitar. 

Yeah. The day before yesterday I was playing at some fancy dinner party in London. 

Was this a private party? 

Yeah. I was supposed to just kind of start playing with no introduction. It was a bunch of fashion industry people that did not give a fuck whether I was there or not, you know? I took a wine glass and I tried to bang it like it was a speech, just trying to start it in one way because the strum of the guitar wasn't going to do it. And I did it too hard and it smashed and everybody just looked terrified, which ended up playing to my favor. Ultimately you feel sort of like an intruder, but then I kind of value that—it was a good experience.

I wanted to ask you about early Iceage tours of America, and if that inspired your writing, because there's definitely a point where the band maybe leaned heavier into certain Americana influences. That's deep on your new record, too. Like, do you fuck with Bruce Springsteen? 

Yeah, I've been heavy on Bruce Springsteen since the early Iceage days, there's a song on New Brigade that was heavily inspired by “Candy's Room” from Darkness on the Edge of Town. Even in the early Marching Church days, I think I did an in-store in Copenhagen in 2010 where I played Bruce Springsteen covers in my own demented way.

Oh, wow.

But I don't think coming to America put Americana inside the music. I think going to America influenced the music and the rapid change of how we progressed at the time because for better or worse, America's hype central and the way we sort of exploded onto the scene was through the mill of hype. We weren't really having that and we didn't want to be pigeonholed by either press nor fans. So I think it put a pressure on ourselves to develop at a more rapid speed than people could put a grasp on. And at a point I think there was almost a perverse desire to disappoint people, at least some of them. 

Yeah, I get that. I think your band has actually done a very good job at gradually expanding the parameters of what you can do. And I think that your newest solo record is one corner of that. 

It's been an opportunity to explore what I can do with songwriting. I created a vessel that could expand into places that didn't rely on everybody getting to have a part, and learning what happens if you really let things be naked. This was an endeavor that I needed to go on by myself, but I can already see that Iceage is feeding off all the work that went into this because we've been in the rehearsal space like crazy. There's way too many ideas than we even have time to work on. And that's partly fueled by getting to explore this area and realizing, Oh, shit, I also have this monster of a band that can play loud and fast over here. So, in a way, I've just once again broadened my vehicles and my outlets for expression. 

You worked with a few outside vocalists on the record. At what point were you kind of like, Okay, I need to flesh this out a little bit? 

I had actually written “Close” for FAUZIA and I had intended just for her to maybe take it and do whatever she wanted with it. But then we met up in London and talked about the song and we kind of agreed that it would be better if we did it together. It's a song that paints a portrait of a love that's a little wrong and a little sick and a little possessive. There's something that isn't quite right, even though it sounds kind of sweet. And I think it just adds a lot to have it done by two people. And then Joanne Robertsson, some of the songs I had imagined a woman's voice and I had toyed around with who it could be. Joanne just happened to be in Copenhagen one day. She was so perfect for it. 

The first track, “Like Lovers Do.” I feel like that really sets the tone for the album. Are there any themes on this record that maybe start from that song?

I feel like a bunch, but not in a calculated sense. I didn't know what it was going to become. It's not a concept album, you know. But it's informed by the life that happened in the period of time that the writing happened in. I think love in its various stages and facets kind of comes across. It paints a picture of various extremes that love can pendulum you between. But then there's also room for fiction and the backdrop of the world.

“The Stalker.” That one feels like a pretty self-contained story. 

Yeah, that's the one that bears off to having nothing to do with real life. It's a story I came up with years ago and I wanted to write it as a novel. I had all the characters and the arc of the story outlined. I began writing some of the meat of the story and I came to realize that if I were to write a thorough piece of fiction like that, it would require me to step back and dedicate a vast portion of my life to it and it just wasn't really happening. But the story stuck with me and I came to the conclusion that I'm never going to write this shit. So, it was a challenge to contain that entire thing into a three-minute song so that this story had a means to exist. 

I thought it was cool that you ended the record with two covers. Obviously, the Spacemen 3 cover makes perfect sense because of your history working with Sonic Boom. How did the Townes Van Zandt cover come about?

Part of the reason why they felt like they belonged on this record is that they were chosen at that time when I was traveling. For “Sound of Confusion,” I was in Lisbon and I was playing at a church. I've been into Spacemen 3 since I was 14 years old. Sonic Boom lives in Lisbon, he produced the last Iceage record, and is a good friend. I was like, Can I ask him, is he gonna be uncomfortable? I asked him and he was down and I couldn't believe it. So he played with me just holding down the two chords that song has on an organ. That was a big moment for me but it kind of felt like the song sort of stayed with me, so I kept playing it.

Yeah.

The Townes Van Zant song—a friend of mine, I was playing at her bookstore in Paris and then she kind of just ordered me to play “No One Else,” and I was like, sure. So that's her fault.

You picked it up fast.

Yeah, and then I kept playing it. 

So what are your plans with this record? Are you going to keep doing more intimate shows? 

I'm planning to do it all. I want to keep doing the intimate acoustic shows. I've also started doing some shows where I have a sampler that I play backing tracks off of, like some cheap nightclub entertainer. And I started incorporating even newer material into those kinds of shows—stuff that I've started tailoring specifically to do that. And then I'm going to tour with a backing band as well. But again, coming back, it's my passport name. It can't be one thing because I'm not.