Iceage – “Coalition”

In Endless Playlist, Treble’s staff helps you stock your own playlists by highlighting the best new tracks to come across our desks, laptops and ipods each week.

Denmark post-punks Iceage found the sweet spot between throat-ripping hardcore and dark, gothic melodies on their debut album New Brigade, but their live shows told a much more visceral and sort of frightening story. Bodies and fists come together in a veritable orgy of destruction, while singer Elias Ronnenfeldt looks on with a blank, menacing I’ll-cut-you-motherfucker stare. That kind of intensity only comes from a unit with a throbbing, hyperactive core, and on new track “Coalition,” it sounds like it’s ready to blow.

Not quite as moody and ominous as anything on the band’s last album, “Coalition” is brighter, and definitely loaded with cathartic thrills. But make no mistake — it’s still a volatile, unstable weapon. Fueling the reactor is the general pairing of self-doubt with sexual angst, which pushes Ronnenfeldt to let out a virulent scream of “Am I supposed to give into anything?!” The answer? “Excess!”, apparently. Though nothing here feels excessive, just driven to the point of reckless, satisfying destruction.