As is always the case with the fourth quarter of album releases, it can become all too easy to let something good slip through the cracks when there are dozens upon dozens of buzzy, discourse-based listens vying for your attention every Friday morning from the moment autumn starts until list season begins. Please do not let Heavy Glory, the debut solo album from Iceage’s Elias Rønnenfelt, be one of those albums. It makes sense that it shouldn’t either. The Danish punk band in itself has yet to release a single underwhelming album across their decade-plus career, so why would the rising stock in rizz of its leader sell us short of those same expectations? And yet, it’s impossible not to listen to Heavy Glory and not hear it as Rønnenfelt stepping out properly to his own swagger and beat.

Where the masses have Harry Styles playing his hand at Americana and country cosplay through his pop star pastiche, Rønnenfelt is the superbly more handsome yet more dangerously reverend answer for the independent rock underground as an outsider putting similar influences together in his pursuits of western romance on “Like Lovers Do” and “No One Else”, barroom reveries “Another Round”, and the dark blues of “Soldier Song” that will more than satiate anyone who enjoyed the cowpunk turns on Plowing Into the Field of Love and Beyondless. Exploding Spacemen 3’s “Sound of Confusion” into a cosmic country burnout and taking a waltz with Townes Van Zandt’s “No Place to Fall” are both tribute and accentuations to his mastery in this craft of rusted guitar rock. It’s got grit, and why that might surprise anyone, I don’t know why it would since Rønnenfelt leaning into his raw instincts have always served him well.

Highlights: “Like Lovers Do”, “No One Else”, “Soldier Song”

Elias Rønnenfelt’s Heavy Glory is available now on Escho.

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