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.

The “cowboy punks” tag has been following National Photo Committee around, and it fits: all the instrumentation and song structure of a typical Americana band, with the slacker attitude turned up a few notches. The analogue is Tiberius’s farm emo; a genre tag self-applied with enough wink to deflect, accurate enough to stick.

The Chicago four-piece describe themselves on Bandcamp as a band “that sounds like they grew up in Virginia and got kicked out of college in Olympia,” which was enough to make me play the album immediately. The David Berman influence is everywhere, and perhaps it’s just the corner of music I’m currently in, but his ghost is loud right now. You can hear it in Max Bottner’s double entendres and wry lines delivered with a perfectly straight face. At one point a phone goes off mid-song and nobody seems bothered. Bottner’s deep baritone does most of the storytelling. The richness of his voice makes him sound older than his years, and you eagerly sit round and listen to what he has to say.

This sort of thing usually comes across as half-arsed or throwaway. Red Hot Photo Committee is neither. It’s a polished, serious record delivered with a glint in its eye and no small amount of swagger.

I’d have called myself reasonably well versed in the first wave of punk. Not an expert, but better than the average person who came to it two decades later. La Peste, though, had passed me by entirely. Boston’s first true punk band, as it turns out.

The original lineup managed one single, 1978’s “Better Off Dead”, before a personnel change and the slow fade that followed. Everything else stayed in the vault: practice-room recordings, 4-track loft tapes, and four songs cut by a pre-fame Ric Ocasek. The opener is one of the Ocasek four, and it’s superb, all forward motion from the first bar.

You can hear where Mission of Burma and the Bush Tetras would go next, the angular Boston racket already half-formed here. Hard not to wonder what La Peste might have become with a few more years of their own.

King Tuff is Kyle Thomas, Vermont-based and well-connected. He’s toured with Ty Segall’s Muggers and fronts WITCH alongside J. Mascis, so the centre of gravity here is no surprise: 60s psych pop, 70s country rock, the same well that I’m always happy to see come back into fashion every few years. MOO offers nothing new. It’s just very well executed.

Recorded on the same Tascam 388 he used for his 2013 debut, the album swings between garage punk cuts and looser, more playful songs. ‘Stairway to Nowhere’ is at the glam end of power-pop and recalls David Vandervelde’s “Nothin’ No”, itself a Marc Bolan facsimile — Bolan being a clear influence on both men. ‘Invisible Ink’ is the most catchy thing here, even if it might inadvertently summon ‘Rock Got No Reason’ from School of Rock. ‘Crosseyed Critters’ is a country-rock stompalong sandwiched between garage cuts. ‘Delusions’ could be Cotton Mather, masters of a previous power-pop revival, doing a Tom Petty tribute. ‘Backroads’ closes things out on a feel-good note, and makes me want to hit play again.