Hi Elias, what do you do in general?
Not really anything. I hang around. I don’t work or study at the moment, so I just hang around with friends and such.

What are you going to do today?
I haven’t figured it out yet. It’s one o’clock here. Just now, I was just sitting in my room reading.
There has been a lot of buzz around Iceage.

Some critics and blogs are hailing you as the saviours of punk. Do you care about such praise?
No, I don’t really care what most of the press are saying, because I know they just try to sensationalise things. I don’t think you should really believe anything you read about yourself.

Had you expected this much exposure, or do you feel the attention suits other bands better?
I don’t know, I guess other bands welcome the exposure more than we do. I don’t know if most of those bands should be exposed anyway. But I didn’t see it coming at all. When we first put out the record in January, we only pressed 500 copies. We didn’t expect to necessarily have to press any more. It just exploded.

And now you have two managers?
We’ve known Nis and Nis for quite some time. They’re not really in the business. Since we are not able to do it all ourselves, we took their offer to help us. It’s not like we have contracts or anything. They are just good-hearted guys who want to help out.

I guess your band name has nothing to do with cartoons, nor with a geological era - or does it?
Haha no, it has nothing to do with that. We just came up with it. It was a long time ago that I saw that movie. I don’t really remember it that well.

Do you remember what you were thinking about when you came up with the intriguing lyrics ‘I thought I had it, but they told me it was just a broken bone’?
Well, I don’t want to get too up-close-and-personal, but it’s about wanting something and thinking that you got it, but it’s not what you thought it was gonna be like.

If you would like to tell us a bit about your background, I’ll try not to go on about your young age.
Haha, yes, that’s so boring. I’ve known the guys for some time now. I met Dan and Johan through school, we started hanging out and found out we had similar tastes. Me and Jakob lived in the same neighbourhood. In 2008, we loosely started playing together. A friend of ours had a drum kit stashed in Jakob’s attic. We started hanging out there a lot. We didn’t really play with a purpose to start a real band. It was more to pass time really.

Do you reckon you want to be doing this for much longer? Do you see an Iceage box set released someday?
Right now it does all feel good, but I can’t say how it’ll feel in a year. I have no idea. We have some other stuff, mainly music projects, that we’d like to realise, but it’s just whatever happens, happens. We’ll do it for as long as the inspiration is there.

Do you ever feel distracted onstage and, for instance, think about your mom’s homemade Danishes?
When we were on tour in the US, we definitely felt homesick sometimes.

As I understand very little about aggression, I guess I want to ask you if you nonetheless wouldn’t want to be in a football stadium yelling slogans to the referee?

Oh no, I wouldn’t say that. I think aggression and violence, when involved directly with it, can be a way of... because it is so chaotic and so much is going on, it can be a way to forget yourself and commit yourself to the now. I guess that’s why it makes sense to me.

Have you ever set anything on fire?
Yes.

What’s with you referring to the audience as ‘victims’? Do they buy records and t-shirts afterwards or do they stumble home and badmouth you the next day?
The victim thing is just misunderstood. There was a picture of one of our friends who got pushed in the moshpit and got injured. He was a victim of that, but we don’t look at our audience as victims. We see them as like-minded people.

There’s some disturbing imagery on your blog and Myspace. There are some pictures of bloody noses, an animated gif of a man French-kissing a goat. But what’s up with Liberian warlord-turned-priest General Butt Naked? He is stated as an influence. He doesn’t influence your stage presence, does he?
Haha, it’s been on there since we started the Myspace page. It was Dan who put it there. I don’t think we’ve been directly influenced by him. He’s a pretty extreme guy.

Iceage play on 14 January in OT301 in Amsterdam. The show is free for Subbacultcha! members. Other live dates: 13/01 - Eurosonic, Groningen