Enigmatic and unpredictable, the seminal talents of Elias Rønnenfelt come to a head with his sophomore solo album, Speak Daggers. He talks Gorillaz, Hamlet, and staying punk.

Elias Rønnenfelt has a reputation for being frosty with journalists, so when I log on to our call, I’m apprehensive of what the next hour entails. The Danish musician has been in the limelight since his late teens: his band Iceage were signed in 2009, when he was 18. Perhaps understandably, Rønnenfelt developed a guarded approach, ranging from the closed off to the downright antagonistic, which comes across in the scattered profiles he’s granted over the years.

Rønnenfelt has just returned to his native Copenhagen after a fortnight of touring the U.S. ahead of the release of his sophomore solo album, Speak Daggers (out today, 17th of October). It’s been an exceptionally busy year for the musician: he put out his debut solo album Heavy Glory last autumn,  a collaborative album (lucre) with Dean Blunt this spring, and a smattering of singles including further collaborations with Blunt, as well as a pair of singles created with Jonatan Leandor (Yung Lean) and Foushee.  

When I ask Rønnenfelt about the tour, he gestures back towards a “restless anxiety” that fuelled his early years as a musician, an anxiety that saw him remain rootless for most of his 20s. “If I didn’t have anything scheduled, I’d find a way to get lost somewhere, or just move. [But] I have reached a place where I also appreciate stillness. And it’s good to get out there, but yeah, I’ve gotten a little more domestic, I would say”. 

He now lives more permanently in Copenhagen, in the neighbourhood where he grew up. It’s this setting in which he made Speak Daggers, which was recorded entirely in his bedroom, a spare and calm space that forms the background of our call. It’s an interesting location for the conception of a record that feels like Rønnenfelt’s most adventurous work yet, incorporating everything from a West African lute in USA Baby to jungle-leaning drum tracks in World Prison, channeled through a sampler that he picked up when he first started working on the album. 

When I tell Rønnenfelt that in this sense the record reminds me of Damon Albarn’s work, he notes that Gorillaz’s self-titled debut album was a key inspiration for Speak Daggers. “When I first started to listen to music on my own it was just hip hop. I’d go to these graffiti and skate shops and they’d have free mixtapes with Nas, or Eve, or Ja Rule, or whatever was hot at the time”.

“And then the Gorillaz album came out and they were showing commercials with their Clint Eastwood song on the TV and they had cool cartoon characters and stuff. And I was like, oh, I like this, you know, so I bought it the day it came out. And that first Gorillaz album really opened up a world of genres to me, trip-hop elements and punk elements and dub elements”.

While Rønnenfelt’s certainly not one for small talk, I’m quickly surprised by how generous and willing he is with his answers. Sometimes he takes his time to speak, but when he does, it’s clear that this comes from a place of measured, considered words. He’s highly articulate, offering up astute and wide-ranging observations made all the more impressive by the fact that English is his second language. 

The lyricism on Speak Daggers is reflective of this, swinging from brash and punk-y statements, “Blunt force trauma with the speed of the lick / Head first collision batter body and brick” across to Shakespearean references, “I know how tender it is to love the babe that milks me / I would, while it was smiling in my face, have plucked my nipple from its boneless gums and dashed the brains out”. 

When I turn to ask Rønnenfelt about the latter, he flashes me a full-face grin and congratulates me on noticing the reference, like I’ve cracked some secret Rønnenfelt-ian code. The album’s title, he points out, is taken from Hamlet. “I was sort of inclined to make something with very sharp edges. I wanted it to be––not offensive, per se––but bold and even wrong in places. And I think that Shakespeare, and a lot of stuff from that time has a way of phrasing things that [is] so cruel, that is fantastic”. 

“Shakespeare is packed with stuff that’s just so brash and crudely phrased that it becomes fantastic in its unnecessary wrongness. It’s almost quite catty … That quote from Macbeth is just so horrible. It’s very memorable for that reason. It’s a horrible quote, but it’s delicious in its horribleness. [Laughs] It’s [so] deliciously phrased in how wicked it is. And it just sort of fits in that desire to express something crude for the sake of it”. 

Feeling that we’ve connected over Shakespeare, I turn to ask Rønnenfelt about his collaboration with Dean Blunt, a collaboration that has propelled the Danish musician’s star-power significantly this year. The music they make together is fluid and perfectly attuned: it’s hard to tell in those songs where Rønnenfelt ends and Blunt begins. As I discover, it’s also a relationship that Rønnenfelt is protective of: “People are a little too hungry for information when it comes to that collaboration. I don’t really want to say too much on anyone’s behalf”. He’s polite but firm, and it’s clear that this is a topic he’s not willing to open up about, perhaps unsurprisingly given Blunt’s notorious elusiveness.

Backing away from Blunt, our conversation ends with my desire to try and root down into exactly why Rønnenfelt is making so much music now. Iceage is respected in its own right, a decade-long foray into rock music that Iggy Pop once called “the only current punk band I can think of that sounds really dangerous”. So why embark on a solo career? 

It’s something that he never quite addresses directly, but maybe in the end it comes back to that teenage restlessness that he told me about at the start of our conversation. “I’ve been at it for a minute now. I’m quite comfortable with my body of work, so maybe there’s not the same kind of spite for people acknowledging something that I’ve made, but I do also feel that time is of the essence, in the sense that these songs, they don’t capture themselves, and they’re born out of this very frail happenstance”. 

“A song doesn’t wait for you. There’s a certain feeling there. You can’t lay low for a few months and expect to still get that song. It needs to be grasped while it’s there. So I do feel a heavy inclination to keep working. I don’t want to lose the moments that could have been there”.  

It’s a charged relationship to have with your work: to see each word as something so fragile and contingent. To Speak Daggers, in the Shakespearean sense, is to acknowledge that language can be just as powerful as brute force. So maybe rather than restlessness, it’s a reverence for language that’s landed him here: if you believe that the right words might only happen once, why not make something of them now? 

Listen to Speak Daggers…

Words – Sasha Mills