Plowing into the Field of Love: The album that made Iceage great

Sometimes, the critical consensus is right.

Back in 2014, Iceage’s third album, Plowing into the Field of Love,¹ was lauded as both a new creative peak and an important evolutionary step for the notable and, in some circles, notorious Danish four-piece. ²

Writing for Pitchfork, Larry Fitzmaurice wrote that the long-player found Iceage “growing up on their own terms,” and “finding a balance between getting older and seeking immortality by way of leaping into an abandoned-lot fire head-first.” Over at the late, great Grantland, Kevin Lincoln wrote that signs of growth and improvement on Plowing suggested that “Iceage now looks like our best bet for a truly great rock band in the operatic, champagne-swilling, mean-mugging sense of the word.”

Those contemporaneous takes are accurate and prescient. They also slightly undersell the album’s importance in Iceage’s still-growing discography and the modern rock canon in music-loving online communities. Plowing into the Field of Love was among the best-reviewed albums of its release year. It’s since assumed a perch atop a surprisingly enduring band’s consistently excellent discography,³ according to both critics and fans.⁴ It’s become the kind of album that predictably dominates fan ratings, inspires appreciation posts for no particular reason and appears in the upper reaches of a popular critic’s best-of-the-2010s list.⁵ The release of a new Iceage album is now treated like a Capital-E Event among people who still care to keep up with rock bands, with each prerelease single worthy of a separate blog post.

That wouldn’t be the case without Plowing into the Field of Love, a blast of often-discordant Gothic punk crafted by a tight-knit crew of snarling art-punk Danes, who had already been famous in blog-bludgeoned circles for years but were still barely scraping the surface of their early 20s.⁶

It’s a capstone on Iceage’s fast-paced and brutish early period that saw the band knock out three full-length albums from 2011 to 2014 and still have a few songs left over. It’s also an adventurous LP that dwarfs its predecessors in sound and scope and serves as a bellwether of the long-gestating music — swaggering, baroque and heavily indebted to classic rock — that the growing band⁷ would later make.⁸

“Forever,” for example, levels up the dark brooding and bestial outbursts of Iceage’s first two albums while also accentuating a gift for melody and complex-for-punk compositions that had been lurking in the relatively lo-fi mire. The song creeps along in fits and starts, starting in a swampy stillness and feinting toward a blow-up. Instead, tension is punctured by creepy, stabbing viola. The song coasts away from the brink before doubling back, barreling toward a violent end, before suddenly slowing amid the creak of strings. When the payoff finally comes, it’s in the form of incendiary mariachi horn that just barely outmuscles Elias Rønnenfelt ‘s voice and eventually reduces the song to ashes. The foundations of future standouts, like Beyondless’ “Painkiller” and Seek Shelter‘s “Vendetta,” were poured in those bright brass notes.

From its opening moments, “How Many” gallops briskly, running headlong into light droplets of atonal piano keys, heightening a contrast in instrumentation found on the band’s second album. At first, the piano’s presence is jarring, but it winds up being more than an added texture. It’s ultimately connective tissue between the manic desperation of its verses and the grandeur of its chorus, a clever way to ground the melodrama of Rønnenfelt bellowing about a sense of utopia over crashing drums without actually reining anyone in.

“Against the Moon,” meanwhile, is a tender ballad inspired by Flemish painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder that sets the template for the endearing shmaltz of “Drink the Rain,” a couple of albums later. “Abundant Living” is similarly archetypal, and it positions the band as good-time Charlies hoisting pints by gaslight. It stumbles forward at a brisk pace, aided by a jovial mandolin that betrays a fondness for the Pogues and presages the rootsy twang more prominent on Iceage’s later LPs. “The Lord’s Favorite,” with its u-less spelling and freewheeling sound, is another hint at the influence folksy, American rock music would come to have on Iceage’s music. The slurred satire of excess is also deservedly among the band’s most fondly regarded songs. It’s a spry toe-tapper with lyrics that purport to offer proof of divinity in debauched imagery. ⁹

While there is an embarrassment of contenders, Plowing into the Field of Love’s finest moment, and the one most indicative of the band Iceage would become, is its album-closing title track. “Plowing into the Field of Love” is, for the most part, an old-school, slow-building anthem. It starts with a stripped-back instrumental intro that’s ended by one of the most forlorn moans ever recorded and a striking description of a man looking out a mansion’s window at refugees. Martialed onward by rapid drums, the song lurches toward a gigantic chorus. As triumphant horns blare, Rønnenfelt brays, “Bootlickers stand aside/ I am plowing into the field of love,” and it’s immediately clear how the phrase had enough staying power to become the album’s title.

The ornate majesty fades away, and is replaced by a single plucked guitar that slowly makes its way through the song’s melody, providing the runway for another gradual ascent toward glory. It would be almost cloying, but it’s capped by machine-gun drumming and raving about being placed in a hearse that brings the song and album to a memorable and fatalistic close.

“Plowing into the Field of Love” is an audacious blend of literary devices, ’70s rock instrumentation and grim observation that manages to feel coherent, as well as stirring and gargantuan. That description could fairly accurately be applied to the Iceage albums that followed it. If early singles from the band’s forthcoming sixth album, For Love of Grace & the Hereafter,¹⁰ are a reliable indicator, the tendency toward expansion, evolution and experimentation established by Plowing into the Field of Love is still a big part of the band’s process.

1. Released via Matador on October 7, 2014, in the United States. It was a strong week for new releases. Other albums out that date include Rips by Ex Hex, Our Love by Caribou, Hell Can Wait by Vince Staples and You’re Dead! by Flying Lotus. I guess I’ll also mention Everything Will Be Alright in the End by Weezer, but I’ve never understood its return-to-form reputation. ↩︎
2. In the 2010s, Iceage was dogged by accusations of neo-Nazi sympathies based on a combination of legitimate misunderstandings, coy-but-deliberate provocation, a penchant for quasi-fascistic imagery, interest in art deemed dangerous that’s common in intelligent-but-naive teens and some indefensibly poor choices. There was a lot of concerning smoke, but ultimately no fire. The band seemed legitimately upset that people concluded it harbored hateful views. Over the years, band members have spoken about their personal politics and shared regret over the way benign or well-intentioned-but-ignorant choices understandably caused consternation. ↩︎
3. Iceage’s debut album came out in 2011. For context and to illustrate the wide range of things that can happen to a band in a decade-and-a-half, some other members of that freshman class are Washed Out, Com Truise, Royal Headache, Hunx and His Punx, the Weeknd and EMA. ↩︎
4. I think I might prefer the bombast of Seek Shelter, Iceage’s fifth album, but recognize the sound I find thrilling could also be described as “overproduced” or “derivative of Britpop.” ↩︎
5. Treble had it in its mid-decade list of best 2010s albums, but it was usurped by Beyondless for a 2025 best-of-the-century list. ↩︎
6. Nick Cave, the Gun Club and, in one notable instance, the Pogues are useful comparators. ↩︎
7. Ahead of Seek Shelter, guitarist Casper Morilla joined the existing lineup of Elias Bender Rønnenfelt, vocals, guitar; Johan Surrballe Wieth, guitar, backing vocals; Jakob Tvilling Pless, bass; and Dan Kjær Nielsen, drums.
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8. Plowing into the Field of Love is about as long as 2011’s New Brigade and 2013’s You’re Nothing combined. ↩︎
9. “The cheap sweat smothered makeup makes her face/ Look as if dissolving and yet full of grace/ Here in the darkness now/ One hundred Euro wine/ I do believe in heaven and I do believe it’s time/ Yeah, it’s time now, yeah/ Five inch white high heels/ I do believe in heaven and I do believe it’s real/ And it’s OK now, OK.” ↩︎
10. Due out May 29 via Mexican Summer. ↩︎