post-punk

I wasn’t a fan of Iceage when they first broke. Strange, given I love nearly every band that fed into them. They had the attitude. The songs were another matter.

That was a long time ago. What changed was Elias Rønnenfelt’s two solo records, Heavy Glory and Speak Daggers, released inside a year of each other. The former leaned into Americana, the latter braided punk, folk and hip-hop, with detours via experimentalists like Dean Blunt. Suddenly prolific, and broadening his palette without dropping his standards. Both were among my favourites of 2024 and 2025.

For Love of Grace & the Hereafter arrives nine months after Speak Daggers and slots neatly into the sequence. It keeps the brightness, urgency and restlessness of early Iceage, recorded back in the same remote Swedish house where they cut Plowing Into the Field of Love, but adds melody, songcraft and a romanticism the early records never had. On “Ember” Rønnenfelt declares “I love you in an ominous way” over a major-key riff that pulls the menace out from under itself.

Look back at the early albums and the distance he’s travelled as a frontman and writer is the real story. He always had presence. He hasn’t suddenly turned into Jeff Buckley, but he now has greater range—emotional and vocal—and, more to the point, the songs to put it to use. I shouldn’t be surprised; we’re all different people in our mid-thirties than we were at nineteen. He’s becoming one of the best frontmen in rock.

Many years ago someone handed me a copy of Wilderness’s self-titled album and I loved it: chanty vocals, post-punk instrumentation, a record I’ve returned to ever since. For reasons I can’t account for, I never looked into who the band were or what happened to them (they disbanded, it turns out, at the end of the aughts).

So it was a nice surprise when a friend sent me this four-track EP and it sounded immediately familiar in the right way. Vulture Feather is a Northern California trio featuring two former Wilderness members, and Craving and Aversion trades that band’s chanty restraint for something more muscular and hypnotic—post-hardcore-indebted art rock, to borrow their own framing. Colin McCann’s vocals still do that preacherly thing. The rhythms circle rather than resolve. A prompt to finally do my homework.

The Twilight Sad have spent twenty years working a seam between Scottish indie, goth, and shoegaze—three sounds that have drifted in and out of fashion around them. It’s The Long Goodbye is their first record in seven years, and it arrives at a moment when shoegaze has gone from a minor concern to something close to a default setting for young guitar bands. Good timing.

James Graham wrote the album while watching his mother live with early-onset dementia. I didn’t know that on first listen—I learned it later, and the lyrics rearranged themselves accordingly on the third or fourth pass. The title stops being a phrase and starts being a description.

Likely to find them their biggest audience yet, and deservedly so.