Iceage

Iceage announce Shake The Feeling: Outtakes & Rarities 2015-2021, their new compilation album out September 23rd on Mexican Summer, and share its title track. Shake The Feeling: Outtakes & Rarities 2015-2021 is a collection of non-LP cuts (or “misfit children,” as singer Elias Bender Rønnenfelt describes them) from the seven years during which Iceage made Plowing Into the Field of Love (2014), Beyondless (2018), and Seek Shelter (2021). A study in the powerful song form and raw execution that have defined the Danish rock ‘n’ roll band, this release digs deep into the Iceage vault for unheard and rare tracks that both devotees and the uninitiated alike will relish.

“Shake The Feeling,” written and recorded during the Beyondless sessions, was left off for being deemed “happy go lucky.” “We thought this one to be a little too ‘nice’ and well behaved at the time,” explains Rønnenfelt. “I didn’t want to learn the song, so I ended up improvising on the final take we did before abandoning it. In hindsight, I find the song to be completely sprawling with an impulsiveness difficult to capture on purpose. It has some of the guitar work I’m personally most proud of.” The video, directed by Alex Cantouris, intercuts behind-the-scenes clips of the band with intimate performance footage from last year’s Pitchfork London.

As with all of Iceage’s albums, whether it be the sensual daring-do of their dark-hardcore debut You’re Nothing, the shift to cowpunk gothic romanticism on Plowing Into the Field of Love, or the space truckin’ gospel-rock of their most recent albums, Rønnenfelt, Johan Suurballe Wieth, Jakob Tvilling Pless and Dan Kjær Nielsen make the impossible seem effortless. True to Iceage’s confounding instincts, the songs of Shake The Feeling are presented in the order that makes most sense to them. The album proceeds to jump forward and backwards in time, with tracks written in the four years between Plowing Into The Field of Love and Seek Shelter colliding with covers of two 1960s songs (“I’ll Keep It With Mine” by Bob Dylan and Abner Jay’s “My Mule”).

As to whether Shake The Feeling has a dominant theme, Elias says: “not really, and then somehow yes.” “No, but also yes” is as perfect an encapsulation of an Iceage-ian ethos as there could ever be. More than just about any other band from Europe working within American rock ‘n’ roll traditions, Iceage maintain their initial embracement of the no-but-yes life-affirming negativity of punk and hardcore. Maybe Elias considers Shake The Feeling to be more a document of Iceage at different points of the members’ young lives than a “piece of artwork.” Maybe the fact that the songs “seem like they can get along” is enough. Conversely, maybe the songs on Shake the Feeling work together as well as any band of outsiders, huddling alone together in the world’s dark. Maybe none of these tracks were the exact right fit for either the gutter or the stars, but like Iceage, they slosh about in the moon-lit muck like they consider themselves wild and alive, and they can’t shake the feeling that they’re lucky and strange just to be anywhere at all.