Not long after quarantine began last March, Iceage released a fitting standalone single called “Lockdown Blues”. The Danish band has returned today with “The Holding Hand”, offering a more optimistic outlook on the future.
Iceage practice patience and restraint here, their usually wiry post-punk muted to a mellow roar. The relative quietness works well with frontman Elias Bender Rønnenfelt’s elastic vocals, which slowly contract and then fill with yearning. “And we row, on we go, through these murky water bodies/ Little known, little shown/ Just a distant call of sound,” he sings. It’s clearly no easy feat to muster up enough perseverance to go on, but it is there.
“The song lives in a slurred world, movements are elastically stretched out and strength is found in weakness while you find it hard to tell the difference between fume and matter,” Rønnenfelt remarked in a statement. “Gently the swaying intensifies, feel it escalate. Reach out for the holding hand, it seems almost within scope now.”
Check out “The Holding Hand” video below. Director Anders Malmberg said his “aim was to create a cinematic experience around image reflections that would tie in closely to the narrative and the emotional atmosphere of the track.”
“The Holding Hand” is Iceage’s first single to be released on Mexican Summer. The Brooklyn-based indie label has previously worked with Best Coast, Kurt Vile, Cate Le Bon, and Weyes Blood. Beyondless, Iceage’s last full-length, was put out in 2018 via Matador Records.
