On ICEBERG’s fascinating, new EP of pristine-sounding pop, her music features a duality of clean, fresh production and blunt, confrontational lyrics, and it is this very duality of purity and hardness that the artist claims inspired her to choose the name.
Formerly based in London as a producer for 4 years, ICEBERG’s yearning for escape led her to retreat to a cabin in the Adirondack Mountains where she based her songwriting process, and on an arts grant, she spent six months writing and producing the music on her EP Swim, before collaborating with Oscar Moose on co-production in 4 studios located in central London, bringing us seven fresh and beautiful snapshots of elegance and beauty through life’s hardships.
Swim’s title track is a piece of sophisticated pop with deep sub-bass, a syncopated beat, gorgeous and airy atmospherics, mostly provided by ICEBERG’s ethereal vocal harmonies set against a metallic and skeletal strummed guitar, and a set of lyrics about ICEBERG’s desire to reach success and recognition with her music, and her fear of aging before fulfilling this desire, striking a chord in nearly all of us with such a universal fear. I Can’t Forgive Me is a wistful piece of pop rock that’s intimate and grand. Sung about a love that never fruited, and another fear, this time of attachment. The song’s clockwork piano chords and conventional bass and drum arrangement give it a solid backbone on which ICEBERG’s masterful vocals soar freely, in one of the album’s most unforgettable and remarkable choruses.
Captor’s acoustic guitar sounds warm and the snaky, arpeggiating part embraces the listener as layers of atmospherics weave a sensual web of sound around the mix. A tight and punchy drum kit gets introduced halfway through the song, grounding the soaring mix into a more approachable and memorable one, paving the way for ICEBERG to deliver one of her most standout and challenging performances on the entire album. Featuring some of the most intricate pieces of arrangement on the album, Blood Bank is a stunner about our need for connection, and while some of us might regard human connection to be some form of surrender or weakness, ICEBERG brings her purity-hardness duality into the equation, telling us that codependence can be life-nourishing for couples that utilize it healthily. Another delayed drums introduction brings a rush of momentum into the arrangement of one of the album’s most curious compositions.
Nothing At All’s wallowing, sweet composition is understated and its drum-less arrangement brings the momentum of the album further down after 10ft’s similarly melancholic and laid-back atmospheres. The intricacies of those two songs lie in their dense and inviting layering. From 10ft and its pounding kick drum beat that works just as a beating heart would, its wailing, atmospheric strings, and a litany of harmony layers, to Nothing At All’s ceremonial, ambient strings and guitars. ICEBERG provides a masterclass in getting the tone down without subtracting from the energy or the pacing of the songs.
ICEBERG’s Swim is lucid and endlessly eloquent. Full of energy, mature, meaningful, and quite beautiful and balanced in sound, it is a work of essential pop sensibilities that would be infinitely easy to recommend and to keep on repeat.