A million years ago when the Boston Phoenix was still around, Daniel Brockman, just ahead of his days as a senior writer for Vanyaland, interviewed Iceage while the Danish band was en route to a gig somewhere here in America. The members played hot potato with the phone, tossing it back and forth between bandmates, each offering a terse answer before handing it off to drummer Dan Kjaer Nielsen. Brockman got the goods, as he usually does, thanks to Nielsen, and the piece was a striking look at one of the most interesting new bands at the time.
That memory floods our senses today as Iceage return with new single “Star,” a jangly, noisy, Pavement-ass indie rock tumbler via Mexican Summer that reminds us just how good music was in the early 2010s. There was excitement, there was intrigue, there were punk bands from Copenhagen just tearing shit up. Take us back.
But hey, here we are. “Star” marks Iceage’s first new music in five years, and arrives with an accompanying video directed by Thinh T. Petrus Nguyen.
Of course, a song called “Star” can be about many things by simply looking up, but here’s a fun passage that came with the press notes: “What love makes you feel like a dying star? A star’s death is the catastrophic culmination. A traceless extinguishing of everything. There is no bigger event. Living inside total collapse, however, and feeling an incandescent present, is perhaps the biggest high we might feel.”
Run and tell that in an interview with a dying alt-weekly.