A Song Of Iceland's Fire

17 July 2012 | 8:45 am | Mitch Knox

“I think we have such different cultures, so I am just kind of curious about that, about the culture in Australia, and the people there."

Just before Nanna Bryndís Hilmarsdóttir's boyfriend arrives home, the co-vocalist and guitarist for Icelandic indie-folk wunderkinds Of Monsters & Men is in the midst of trying to remember something very important.

“There was a guy called Tony, right?” she muses. “And he had long hair, and then they cut it?”

She is asking the wrong person. We offer to Google the answer. “Actually, my boyfriend's just walked in here; he's like a fanatic. I'll ask him.”

A brief exchange in Icelandic follows before she corrects herself: “Toadie, sorry!”

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Yep – Jarrod “Toadfish” Rebecchi, played by the formerly portly Ryan Moloney, is Hilmarsdóttir's favourite Neighbours character, and an inadvertent ambassador for what the honey-voiced singer expects of the average Australian when she and her bandmates arrive on our shores for the first time this month. “I think you're nice,” she says. “I think you're nice people. I watch Neighbours. I watch it a lot. They all seem very nice.

“I think we have such different cultures, so I am just kind of curious about that, about the culture in Australia, and the people there. I've found that as we've been travelling we've met all these people, and the vibe in each country is very different. I think I'm curious to be able to say, 'Oh, yes, Australians are like that,' you know?”

She speaks with the air of a globetrotting veteran; one would never guess that this is a band that has been together for all of two years, especially given their touring schedule of late. “We just came back to Iceland,” Hilmarsdóttir says. “We were on tour in America and we did a small European tour, and now we're resting for a short period of time before we go on a big tour – we go for two-and-a-half months through Europe and Australia and America.

“The response has been very… I want to say unexpected, but you know, it's been great. I don't think we really expected to be where we are today, touring and doing all this stuff. But we're really happy with it.”

Despite the quick amassing of experience – and a lauded debut album, My Head Is An Animal, behind them, this whole touring business is still a very new game for the sextet, and so even a trip to the antipodes carries with it an aura of childlike wonder for Hilmarsdóttir.

“We've never been [to Australia] before, so it's very exciting for us,” she enthuses. “When we were hearing about where we were going next, and our manager was like, 'Hey, you're going to Australia,' we were like, 'Oh my god! That's great!' We kind of lost our minds a bit. We're really far away, our two countries, and I don't think that many people [in Iceland] have been to Australia. One of my best friends, she grew up there for a few years, and she's always telling me about it, and all the funny names of small towns and stuff like that – but I can't remember any now. But… we're very excited.”

Also new for the band is the reality that people outside of their own diminutive borders have found, listened to, and embraced their music, evidenced by their recent reaction to hearing their own song while abroad in Germany.

 “I don't think it's kind of grabbed me yet… we were at the airport, we were ordering some sandwiches, and we heard our song on the radio. That was the first time I'd ever heard our song outside of our country. I don't listen to the radio outside of Iceland, so that was really weird. We all kind of stopped and laughed, and then we started to fool around and sing along. The guys were being awkward; they were singing very loudly. And that's when I went, 'Oh, they're actually playing us in Germany,' because you can say, 'Yeah, they play you here,' but you don't actually get it until you hear it. I like that.”

Starting as a solo project in 2010, Of Monsters & Men blossomed into a fully fledged band as Hilmarsdóttir brought into the fold her guitarist friend Brynjar Leifsson and recent acquaintance Ragnar Þórhallsson, who also performs vocal and guitar duties. Three more members followed and chemistry happened, as chemistry is wont to do.

“I feel like we just really connected well together, and I think we really enjoyed it, too,” Hilmarsdóttir recalls. “It was very new and fresh and interesting, and we were really passionate about what we were doing.

“What keeps us together now is that we're sharing this really great experience together now, and these guys, who I didn't really know before this, have become my best friends, so it's this really fun experience for all of us.”

Of Monsters & Men

Though she says the band never expected much – or anything – to come of it, knowing the country's pedigree when it comes to groups of fine musicians had to have given them some measure of confidence. After all, it kind of sounds like playing tunes is something of a national pastime. “Many of my all-time favourite bands are from Iceland, and I really think there's a lot of music coming out of here, if you think about how small a population we are,” Hilmarsdóttir says. “We're only 320,000 people. I don't know what it is, but we have this theory going on that there's not a lot going on in Iceland, except in the summertime, but it's like, it's cold sometimes, and it's dark in the winters, and you kind of have to find something to do with your time, so I think many people start writing music.”

The alternative theory is that Iceland has always produced excellent musicians; it's just, until the digital age, nobody really knew about it. Hilmarsdóttir agrees:

“It's of course very hard for Icelandic musicians to get out there because we're an island and it's expensive, it's really expensive, for bands to go and get all their gear and tour so it really has to pay off, and it's hard,” she says. “So I think, with the internet, it's gotten a lot easier because you can get your music out there fairly easily. So… yay, internet!”

Indeed – the web is at least partially responsible for the group's meteoric rise. But the flipside of that is now they have a globe's worth of fans to play for, they're just not sure when we'll get a second serve of album goodness to devour, so best you experience them while they're here.

“We've just got a lot of touring going on right now,” Hilmarsdóttir says. “We were talking amongst ourselves about when we would be able to record the next album, and we just really don't know at this point. The beginning of next year and next summer, it just looks like we'll be touring… But it's a really new experience for us to be touring, and we're just really enjoying it.”