It’s always tempting to be a bit sceptical whenever a press release promises that a band are going back to their roots, especially when it’s a band who, in no uncertain terms, have spent their entire career in a constant state of evolution. So when the first reports of Iceage’s sixth album For Love Of Grace & The Hereafter surfaced, and the emphasis was seemingly placed on their return to some kind of youthful simplicity – “a return to the immediacy and rough edges of their earliest days” – the cynicism was warranted. There was precisely zero chance that they were going to make a thorny, frosty No Wave album in the same vein as their first album, New Brigade. Hell, there was probably just about as much chance that they were going to make the kind of monolithic noise rock that appeared on their second record You’re Nothing. So what could they possibly have meant, if anything at all?

After the first listen to For Love Of Grace & The Hereafter, it actually becomes remarkably clear. While this isn’t an aggressive or ‘dark’ album in any sense, there is a soupçon of the kind of recklessness that they have gone to great lengths to avoid over the past few albums. It becomes clear that what they mean by ‘earliest days’ is the time they first started seriously listening to music, between 2004 and 2007, because that is exactly the era of rock music – particularly indie pop – that they are drowning in on For Love Of Grace & The Hereafter.

From their third album (Plowing Into The Fields Of Love) onwards, Iceage seemed to be growing exponentially bigger with each release. Where once they played a rather morbid, frozen take on post-punk, their sound eventually grew closer to Oasis and The Verve than Warsaw or DNA (via The Velvet Underground, The Pogues, Primal Scream, Nick Cave in all his iterations and Scott Walker). Part of this evolution – and now, regression – has been down to singer, lyricist and general leader Elias Bender Rønnenfelt’s endless creative energy. The man is unstoppable – his catalogue far outstrips many artists twice his age, and his relentless focus on producing capital-A Art is staggering. With his bandmates – Johan Surrballe Wieth (guitar), Jakob Tvilling Pless (bass), Dan Kjær Nielsen (drums), and 2019 recruit Casper Morilla (guitar) – he has been tweaking, refining, smoothing and stroking their collective sound until it reached a shiny, sleek Britpop-adjacent sound on 2021’s Seek Shelter.

Now, it seems, they’ve gone to great lengths to remove the sheen, and replace gloss with eyeliner. For the most part, if their intention was to make an indie sleaze record then it’s a resounding success. Ember opens with a cute little piano figure before developing into a Replacements-esque college rocker with a black eye and a broken heart. It’s built around a simple but insistent chug, and it works. There’s something of The Cure’s faux-naive doo-doo-doo melodic trickery on Match Head Girl but it’s mostly treading a scratchy, nervy indie rock path. The following two tracks, The Weak and No Fear, are very strange indeed. They confirm the suspicion that Elias and the boys have, for one album only, committed to becoming some kind of mutant 2006 indie sleaze band, after only hinting it at on the prior tune. This is real, genuine, black Topman skinny jeans, watching Skins, warm Oranjeboom in the park NME indie sleaze – and this is a really risky tactic (see: my Molotovs review).

Depending on how much you were listening to what the NME was recommending 20 years ago, you’ll hear everyone from The Libertines to The Futureheads, The Strokes to Franz Ferdinand, The Kooks to Vampire Weekend and even (say these words very, very, quietly) The Wombats over the course of the remaining half hour of the record. You’ll hear third-generation Iggy Pop worship on Mother-Of-Pearl, and the way it’s played is not a million miles away from 2006 Razorlight. Salve For The Sore has more than a touch of Vampire Weekend about it – or is that Two Door Cinema Club?

1835 may actually make you laugh out loud. The commitment is outrageously strong here – this time it’s The Cribs. Lifetime, too. These songs will almost certainly trigger a trauma response in people who have experienced the heady combined stench of Batiste Dry Shampoo, Amber Leaf and Toffee Apple Brothers Cider while being half-forced to listen to Torn On The Platform blasting out of the speakers of some shitty club in a converted warehouse (with apologies to all of those affected). There should be a trigger warning. The exception to the rule, Star, is probably the best song here, and it’s curiously genreless – definitely not the indie sleaze they’ve been peddling for the past 25 minutes. It’s beautiful, romantic, pretentious, noisy… Superb. It does, however, follow Tender Blades, which is extremely 2007. And Holy Water is one song where they drop the noughties cosplay and write something that sounds relatively modern; as it turns out, they end up sounding exactly like Dry Cleaning. Weirdly, True Blue sounds like it must have been written during sessions for the last album, because it doesn’t sound like anything else here – there’s not even a whiff of The Holloways or The Pigeon Detectives about it. It’s back to the big sky, open road cinematic sound of Seek Shelter, just with a little extra sauce on the guitar tone.

For the first time, Iceage have produced a simple, straightforward album that’s hooks-first and tunes-heavy. That has never happened before. Elias is at his most restrained and thoughtful, the band at their most focused, and it’s easily their most cohesive selection of songs ever. All jokes aside, this shit slaps. But who, genuinely, asked for this? Is anybody listening to Iceage to be reminded of the good old days when Britain was led by Gordon Brown? (Although many of us would actually take that in a fucking heartbeat over what we’ve had since.) If you were born between 1988 and 1994, you will have been the target market for music like this specific blend of indie rock, and you will have enjoyed lots of it in real time as it was released on the world. So to hear it now, repurposed and refashioned and re-fucking-energised by these unwashed and sexy Danish vampires is something that feels genuinely thrilling. It’s Album of the Year, just 19 years too late. What the devil will they do next? Black Metal? Yacht Rock? Grindcore? Hyperpop? Don’t put it past them.