ELIAS RØNNENFELT

In 2022, when COVID restrictions forced poet and musician Elias Rønnenfelt to pause touring with Iceage, the band he founded when he was 16, and with whom he had made some of the most consequential guitar music of the 2010s, he took matters into his own hands. Heavy Glory, his debut album under his own name, is the culmination of a series of impromptu solo gigs across Europe and reflects a newfound spontaneity in Rønnenfelt’s practice. The ravaged punk nihilism that informed his earlier work with Iceage and Marching Church is notable by its absence, replaced with bluesy stylings reminiscent of Townes Van Zandt, whose doleful waltz “No Place to Fall” is covered at the album’s bookend. Elsewhere, Rønnenfelt experiments with omniscient narration on “Stalker”, a nasty love story-cum-murder ballad that could have been written at any point over the past 500 years. Above all, Heavy Glory is a record of novelistic, Cohen-esque detail, drowned kittens and rusty farewells, state penitentiaries and the profound desolation of Luton Airport. Listen to his TANK Mix below.

Matteo Pini The timeframe in which Heavy Glory was written was one of ambivalence, when the world was neither open nor closed. How did the album materialise?
Elias Rønnenfelt The beginning of the songwriting process took place in the tail-end of COVID where I was weary with the fact that there was no summer about to happen, that Iceage couldn't be touring. I took matters into my own hands and created an Instagram post and a public email where I was like, I will play solo anywhere in Europe. I got hundreds of propositions, and I said yes to anything that seemed somewhat possible. I had the realisation that it was quite possible to just write something in the moment and play it. That's how the initial spark came, and how a bunch of these songs were written. The songwriting was going take its own course informed by life itself beyond any restrictions there may or may not have been at the time. It's not a COVID record by any means of imagination, but it forced me to write in a way where the song was to function solely on its own, stripped of everything but myself and the guitar. When I write, there are often many layers and ideas of layers going on in my head. These songs were made to function on their own.

MP Love figures heavily in the lyrics of Heavy Glory, embodied both as a real person and a spectral, ambiguous presence.
ER I didn’t set out to do a record on the stages of love. Love showed its face in various stages and its various faces, mutating over the course of the album. Love is really quite common yet can feel like the complete sense of the universe of our individual lives. It’s a bottomless pit, a bottomless resource that we all deal with and try to make sense of. Because it is perceived as endlessly unique, it has endless vantage points. It is so entirely common and so incredibly special. 

MP Luton Airport also gets a namecheck.
ER The jab at Luton was born of many undesired experiences that I've had in that place. I was sitting with the line “Rome wasn't built in a day”. I said okay, what is the place that's by definition less impressive than the Roman Empire? Luton was the first thing that came to mind. It was a small exercise in revenge. 

MP The album has an Americana, almost country twang. What was your vision for the album’s sonics?
ER All the album’s fundamentals existed between me and the guitar. When you have this skeleton of the song you might start hearing other elements and playing on top of it. I was letting myself be guided by that and trying to honour the stripped-back nature of how they're written, not letting it be oversaturated, searching for the right element, the sound or rhythm that feels like it needs to be there. A big part of the art itself is to recognise the point when you need to be hands-off. It’s like the song is not hungry anymore.

MP The album will be released under your name, but do you still feel like there's a narrative distance between you and the character that you're portraying in these songs?
ER Some songs veer away from a very personal stamp, point or vision. I never wrote much with character in mind, except for the songs that are kind of obviously fiction. The song “Stalker” is complete fiction. It's an idea for a novel I had for a bunch of years. I had the whole story, which is pretty much as it is in the song cut to its bone and marrow. I had the outline and the characters all set up and I had hoped to write it, but I came to the realisation that if I wanted to do something like that, I would have to take a chunk of time out of my life and dedicate myself to it in a way that I wouldn’t have space or ability to do anything else. In order for the story not to die, I tried to see if I could distill it into a three-minute song. 

MP When you write, do you differentiate between poetry and lyrics? 
ER The main difference is the framework. There’s a great sense of comfort in being guided and limited by verses and choruses, syllables and melody. A lot of the creative process is about limiting yourself, finding the restraints and parameters that allow you to encapsulate something. I put out a poetry book last year [Sunken Heights], and editing that thing was such a bitch. There's nothing that dictates when a sentence stops or when something is supposed to end. You don't have anything to guide you in that matter. I find that a song is both in composition and mood and anything like something to play up against. It’s never just the lyrics, it’s playing around with everything that surrounds them. You are limited by capabilities. I don't envy people that have great technical capability, because when you can do anything, what the hell do you do? I have got to work with what I get, and I'm wonderfully limited. 

Heavy Glory is out now. Photo by Jonas Bang.