In June of 2022 Of Monsters and Men premiered a short film at the Tribeca Film Festival called Tíu. Captured by Canadian filmmaker Dean DeBlois, the intimate documentary followed the Icelandic music ensemble in the wake of what would have been a tour celebrating the tenth anniversary of their debut album My Head Is an Animal in 2021. A global pandemic having other ideas on the matter, the group made the best of a bad situation by instead allowing DeBlois—who previously captured fellow Icelanders Sigur Rós in their natural element for 2007’s Heima feature—to tag along as they traveled across their mountainous island country as they performed previously unreleased songs in locations tied to the personal memories and history of the band’s members.
One such setting was within the echoing base of a lighthouse on the peninsula township of Garður. Located southwest of Reykjavík, Garður is where co-vocalist and songwriter Nanna Bryndís Hilmarsdóttir spent her youth. “I grew up watching that lighthouse,” she says over Zoom from her home, wrapped in a sweater, a keyboard and the neck of an acoustic guitar breaking into the screen’s frame. “You have the ocean and you have this lighthouse, and it’s beautiful. I kind of have this fantasy of being a lighthouse keeper. There’s something romantic about it.”
While Hilmarsdóttir doesn’t disclose whether this hypothetical alternative reality has always been with her or is more of a recent longing, she admits that when she and the rest of the band were forced into isolation after spending 10 years experiencing the cycle of writing and recording music, the international travel and live performances that follow, and having their music referenced in the same breath as that of Björk and Sigur Rós, a natural recalibration for something simpler and relatively normal naturally started to seep into who they were as individuals and as a group. It was as if they were allowed to actually look at other aspects of their respective lives beyond Of Monsters and Men. “There were transitional things happening within the band,” says Hilmarsdóttir, “a lot of new realities.”
Some of the members started or expanded their own families; others turned their attention to their own solo pursuits. The latter included Hilmarsdóttir, who released her debut solo album How to Start a Garden in 2023. Combined with the fact that the band also decided to part ways with their longtime label, Republic, Of Monsters and Men found themselves under no real obligation to even keep making music together. “It was kind of an anxious time for us,” says Hilmarsdóttir. “It was a little bit, ‘OK, what’s the next step? Is there a next step?’ I think it was the first time ever where it was this very conscious thing of, ‘We don’t need to continue doing this, do we want to?’ And it was nice to have that feeling of, ‘Yeah, we actually want to make this record.’”
Convening at their personal studio, Skarkali, the band embraced a certain lack of urgency to their new songs, letting them naturally build, break down, and evolve until a final iteration presented itself. “Honestly, all of us are such ADHD-heads,” says Hilmarsdóttir. “We’re all a bunch of butterflies. When we get into a room, it’s chaos most of the time. But then, suddenly, there will be hyper focus. It was very much us just showing up at the studio, having a good time, and drinking lots of coffee.” While the resulting album, All Is Love and Pain in the Mouse Parade, thrums with the group’s signature anthemic melodies, unlike their previous times as grand marshals—perhaps for the first time in their career—the group doesn’t feel self-conscious about whether anyone is actually following their procession. They’ve seemed to realize that with their layers of marching percussion, piano, synths, strings, and horns, they’re all the cavalcade they’ve ever needed.
“It was the first time where it was this very conscious thing of, ‘We don’t need to continue doing this, do we want to?’ It was nice to have that feeling of, ‘Yeah, we actually want to make this record.’”
Perhaps the best example of this connective ease is the somber “Fruit Bat,” which spends the entire back half of its eight-minute runtime in the kind of crescendo that builds itself brick by brick, establishing a firm image of the band watching one another in the studio, waiting for wordless signals to climb just one more step. “I think we’d lost a little bit of that moment of just being in a room together,” says Hilmarsdóttir. “I really learned a lot through my solo album how important that is. It’s key. That laid the groundwork for this record. We really needed to be in the same space and feed off each other.”
Of course the element that’s always elevated Of Monsters and Men has been the vocal interplay between Hilmarsdóttir and co-band leader Ragnar Þórhallsson. More than anything that the band has produced previously, the new record presents songs that are in constant conversation with themselves. At times Þórhallsson and Hilmarsdóttir’s alternating vocals achieve mutual agreement; at others, they’re at complete odds with one another.
As Hilmarsdóttir explains, the conversations aren’t even taking place at the same time, but are still communicating something true from two separate sides. On “Dream Team,” for example, Þórhallsson sings: “Kicking plants / Feeling tall / I’m the face behind the maze behind the door / But you need me there.” By the bridge, Hilmarsdóttir responds: “Heavy head / Don’t you start now / There are a million different endings to a song / And if the best part is in the past, love / You’ll be the face behind the maze behind the door.” “We’re kind of playing different characters in these songs,” says Hilmarsdóttir. “We do it a lot.”
As All Is Joy and Pain’s title would suggest, Hilmarsdóttir says the album really embraces how hardly anything in our lives—especially our emotions—is ever entirely defined by one thing. “It really is that idea that you can’t have one without the other.” In a word, Hilmarsdóttir calls many of the songs “bittersweet.” Of course, not everything is part of a two-sides-of-the-same-coin metaphor. Beyond love and pain, there can also be the strange, the comical, or the outright absurd. “Heavy is the head / Happy is the fool,” Þórhallsson sings on the playfully titled “Tuna in a Can.”
“So much of our reality now is just ridiculousness. You just feel like, ‘Is this really happening?’ At the same time, you’re just trying to march on.”
Such farce is also where the title’s “mouse parade” comes into play. Inspired by the mice that would occasionally invade the studio to shelter themselves from the cold, Hilmarsdóttir and Þórhallsson began the project by writing a pair of songs that were once again in dialogue with one another. “It’s definitely telling a story,” explains Hilmarsdóttir. “First you have ‘The Block,’ where you’re in this tower in a city, and it’s all of these human emotions. And then [on ‘Mouse Parade’] we kind of imagined that you would travel beneath the floorboards and we wanted this song to feel like you were hearing what was going on upstairs from the perspective of these mice who have their own history and their own experiences with love and pain and all these things. Trying to get an image of that into a song—I loved doing that.”
For those who may question the merits of transposing real-world emotions onto a community of rodents, Hilmarsdóttir says, “So much of our reality now is just ridiculousness. You just feel like, ‘Is this really happening?’ At the same time, you’re just trying to march on.”
Of Monsters and Men seemed pleased to march on at this point, as it began the next phase of their career. “I do feel very grateful,” says Hilmarsdóttir. “The biggest success that I can think of is still being in a band with these guys. We’ve definitely had ups and downs, just as people making this thing together that we care so deeply about. There’s been moments where it feels really good, and then there’s been moments where it’s felt stressful, but I’m happy that we’re at this place right now where I think we’re kind of just appreciative that we get to do this, and that we actually like doing this.” FL
