Elias Rønnenfelt – Speak Daggers

Elias Rønnenfelt often sounds as though singing is an act of exorcism—as if each guttural gasp and howl scrapes his throat raw on its way out. The Danish frontman has spent most of his life in this tension between beauty and agony. Since forming Iceage as a teenager in 2008, he’s been a vessel for volatility, his voice carrying the weight of youth’s decay and the spiritual hangover that follows. On his 2024 solo debut Heavy Glory, Rønnenfelt began carving out a new space for that restlessness—one where his apocalyptic croon could stretch into something looser, stranger, and more wounded. Less than a year later, Speak Daggers finds him doubling down, turning his obsessions with faith, love, and punishment into a hallucinatory sprawl of industrial haze and gothic club beats.

If Heavy Glory hinted at freedom, Speak Daggers sounds like the price of it. Rønnenfelt surrounds himself with a cast that feels almost mythic: reggae elders the Congos lend haunted harmonies to “Not Gonna Follow,” their melodica drifting through blown-out percussion and metallic echoes. He repeats fragments like mantras—“The stars, the reach / The ends, the means”—as if trying to conjure meaning from exhaustion. “Blunt Force Trauma,” a duet with Erika de Casier, pushes his gravelly growl against her breathy cool, turning violence into foreplay: “Soft against the hard, like saliva on concrete,” he murmurs. Elsewhere, not every experiment lands—Fine’s vocals on “Kill Your Neighbor” get buried in the mix—but even the missteps feel deliberate, like scars the record refuses to conceal.

Across Speak Daggers, devotion and destruction are indistinguishable. “I love you / I hurt you even better,” he confesses on “Mona Lisa,” one of his most hypnotic songs to date, its gunshot percussion and serrated strings slicing through a haze of addiction and decay. On “Crush the Devil’s Head,” Rønnenfelt spirals downward again, his voice slurred and staggering: “Lord knows he’s made a devil out of you.” The rhythm lurches like a dying engine. When he turns his gaze outward, as on “USA Baby,” the result is just as bleak—a dirge for empire, complete with the rattle of chains and the faint hum of collapse.

The Iceage frontman’s signature blend of eroticism and apocalypse has never felt more disembodied. Where his band once conjured chaos through sheer velocity, his solo work finds the drama in suspension. The tempos drag like cigarette smoke; the beats dissolve into fog. He croons and mutters in a style that recalls both Lil Peep’s bruised vulnerability and Nick Cave’s biblical severity. “If this is a prison, then the world is one,” he declares on “World Prison,” collapsing the sacred and the mundane into one grim prophecy.

Rønnenfelt’s Speak Daggers isn’t an act of reinvention so much as endurance—a record that treats pain not as performance but as proof of life. Every song bleeds toward the next, each breath carrying the faint hiss of something holy and half-dead. In his world, redemption is temporary, beauty is corrosive, and every act of love feels like another small, merciful death.