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**New Brigade**
★★★★☆

In the grand tradition of Danish punk troublemakers, Iceage arrived in 2011 like a brick through a stained-glass window, all jagged edges and righteous fury. Their debut album *New Brigade* wasn't just an introduction – it was a manifesto scrawled in blood and spit, a seventeen-song assault that clocked in at barely half an hour but felt like witnessing the apocalypse through a kaleidoscope.

The quartet – barely out of their teens when they recorded this incendiary debut – emerged from Copenhagen's underground with the kind of swagger that suggested they'd been raised on a steady diet of Black Flag records and existential dread. Frontman Elias Bender Rønnenfelt possessed the kind of voice that sounded like it had been dragged through gravel and soaked in absinthe, while the rhythm section of Jakob Tvilling Pless and Dan Kjær Nielsen provided the kind of locked-in brutality that would make Steve Albini weep with joy. Johan Surrballe Wieth's guitar work, meanwhile, carved through the mix like a rusty blade, all discordant beauty and controlled chaos.

*New Brigade* sits firmly in that sweet spot where hardcore punk meets post-punk experimentalism, owing as much to Wire and Joy Division as it does to Minor Threat or Negative Approach. But this isn't mere pastiche – Iceage brought something genuinely unsettling to the table, a Nordic noir sensibility that transformed familiar punk tropes into something altogether more sinister. The production, courtesy of Nis Bysted, captures the band in all their raw, unvarnished glory, with just enough clarity to let the songs breathe while maintaining that crucial sense of barely contained mayhem.

The album explodes into life with "White Rune," a minute-and-a-half blast of pure adrenaline that sets the template for everything that follows. Rønnenfelt's vocals oscillate between a sneer and a howl, while the band locks into a groove that's simultaneously hypnotic and violent. It's punk rock distilled to its absolute essence, stripped of everything but pure, kinetic energy.

"Remember" stands as perhaps the album's finest moment, a two-minute masterclass in tension and release that showcases the band's ability to marry brutality with genuine songcraft. The track builds from an ominous crawl into a full-blown assault, with Rønnenfelt delivering one of his most compelling vocal performances over a backdrop of churning guitars and thunderous rhythms. It's the sound of youth confronting its own mortality, beautiful and terrifying in equal measure.

Elsewhere, "Broken Bone" demonstrates the band's knack for memorable hooks buried beneath layers of distortion and aggression, while "Coalition" strips things back to their barest components – just voice, guitar, and the kind of primal rhythmic pulse that gets under your skin and stays there. The album's brief running time works entirely in its favour; there's no fat here, no unnecessary diversions, just seventeen bursts of concentrated fury that leave you gasping for air.

What makes *New Brigade* particularly compelling is how it manages to sound both timeless and utterly contemporary. These songs could have been recorded in a New York loft in 1977 or a Manchester squat in 1979, yet they possess an urgency that feels entirely of their moment. There's something in Rønnenfelt's delivery – that peculiar combination of nihilism and romanticism – that speaks to a specifically millennial sense of displacement and rage.

More than a decade on, *New Brigade* has aged remarkably well, its influence audible in countless underground bands who've attempted to capture that same lightning in a bottle. Iceage themselves have evolved considerably since this debut, incorporating elements of folk, country, and even orchestral arrangements into their increasingly sophisticated sound. Albums like *Plowing Into the Field of Love* and *Seek Shelter* have seen them mature into something approaching elder statesmen of the international punk scene, but they've never quite recaptured the pure, undiluted fury of this debut.

*New Brigade* remains a high-water mark for 21st-century punk rock, a reminder that the form still has the power to shock, provoke, and inspire. It's an album that demands to be played loud, preferably in the company of like-minded miscreants, and serves as compelling evidence that the spirit of punk rock is alive and well in the most