On the Brink of Insanity with Danish Punk Band Iceage

Like a lot of teenagers, Elias Bender Rønnenfelt spent hours alone in his room listening to music. He was a Danish kid growing up in the new millennium, but the sounds that excited him were American and British, from prior decades. “All sorts of New York no wave bands,” says the now 26-year-old Rønnenfelt. “David Bowie. Crass. Teen Idles.”

One of his favorites: the seminal punk band Richard Hell and the Voidoids. So it was disorienting for Rønnenfelt when Richard Hell, the 68-year-old punk veteran, recently wrote an impassioned essay in praise of his own band, Iceage. In it, the veteran imagines himself “as a kid lying in my closed-door room while visiting the New York offices of Matador Records in March: “It's strange,” he adds, “when a voice from your teenage bedroom speaks back at you.”