Of Monsters And Men On Their Expansive Career & The Music Industry: "I Can Really See How Bizarre A Lot Of It Is"

Nanna Bryndís Hilmarsdóttir of the celebrated folk-rock outfit chats to The Music about fame, introspection, and creativity ahead of the band's upcoming Australian tour.

There was a time - and that time was the entirety of 2011 - when the song Little Talks by Of Monsters And Men was almost completely ubiquitous. With its raucous horns, anthemic chorus, and shouted “heys,” it is a song that perfectly epitomises that very particular era of stomp-clap folk-pop, the golden age of millennial hipster-dom.

For a while, the band’s sound was inescapable. Indeed, in 2017, Of Monsters And Men - currently made up of members Nanna Bryndís Hilmarsdóttir, Ragnar Þórhallsson, Brynjar Leifsson, Kristján Páll Kristjánsson, Arnar Rósenkranz Hilmarsson - became the first Icelandic band to surpass a whopping one billion streams on Spotify. And then there was a period of time where the band took a hiatus, and didn’t release anything new for six whole years, until they finally dropped the album All Is Love And Pain In the Mouse Parade in 2025.

Nanna Bryndís Hilmarsdóttir sips her coffee contemplatively over a Zoom call (it is morning in Iceland, early evening in Australia); she exudes a gentle sensitivity. In her lyrical Icelandic lilt, she explains, “We needed a bit of a break.”

After the 2019 release of their album Fever Dream, she says, “We all went into our own corners and worked on different projects. People started families. In some ways, it felt like we didn’t have to go on and make another album - that was the feeling in the band.”

All Is Love And Pain In the Mouse Parade is a project that formed organically, not out of a sense of obligation. “The cool thing about this album is that it really stems from a place of wanting to spend time together and wanting to go to the studio together. And it was a thing that we worked on very slowly. ”

They weren’t suffering from time pressure, they were without a label and without management, they were just starting to figure everything out again after the global pall that was the coronavirus pandemic. “It reminded us a lot of when we were starting out,” Hilmarsdóttir notes. “It was total freedom. If we decided to not release anything, we could just be spending our time in the studio making something that we didn’t have to release, that was also totally fine. Being in that space is very freeing, and it did influence the album a lot.”

Essentially, they made All Is Love And Pain In the Mouse Parade because they wanted to, because it felt right. Was there ever a world in which Of Monsters And Men didn’t come back to make another album together?

“I don’t know,” she says slowly. “In some ways, maybe yes. But I think because we had this break and we had a lot of changes in our environment, it allowed us to go into the album very excited about it.”

In 2023, while the band was still on hiatus, Nanna released her debut solo album, How To Start A Garden.

“I really felt this deep need to go and explore this deep part of me. It’s made me, in a lot of ways, more who I am, which is a very introverted person. I do like the quietness, all the small moments in the quiet, and noticing things that live in that space. And I feel like making my solo album really allowed me to deep-dive into that world.”

She felt, then, that she was able to bring that part of herself to All Is Love And Pain In the Mouse Parade, which she describes as the band’s most introspective - and most truly collaborative - album yet.

“Brynn, our guitar player, he has another band with his Norwegian friends, and they tend to do a lot of string arrangements, so we got these friends involved. And all the people that I met through my journey as a solo artist, we brought them into this album. Really, this album is about merging all different sides of us.”

Of Monsters And Men are set to tour the album across Australia in mid to late May, stopping in Victoria, New South Wales, and Queensland, along with special guest, the Australian folktronica singer-songwriter Gordi.

It is something she is - mostly - looking forward to. “Every time, at least when we come to Australia, I feel like people are very open. It’s always a really good time.” She is not, however, particularly excited about the journey over. “It’s so far. I’m dreading the flight right now. I don’t know how you guys do it,” she laughs. “But it is worth it, that’s what I think.”

In 2011, the band released their stratospherically successful debut album, My Head Is An Animal - a time she looks back on as being rather surreal. (The album debuted in the United States at number six on the Billboard 200, selling 55,000 units in its first week alone - the best chart performance for an Icelandic musical artist in U.S. history.)

“You know, it’s interesting,” she murmurs as she reflects on their breakneck emergence into the music industry. “[The album] had this…moment. I remember we were in the major label world, and looking back at it, I can really see how bizarre a lot of it is. It’s so stark, from being these kids on this island to being in that environment.”

Beginning one’s career with a bang, so to speak, would hardly be easy. Expectation and pressure were piled on. She remembers everyone warning the band about how tricky the debut album would be to follow up. “It did help us that we went back home. We recorded our second album in a deep winter in Iceland. My memory of writing and recording that album is just a snowstorm the entire time.”

Iceland acts as a sort of haven. “It always really helped us to just come here and be in our world and create music from that place and not get swept up in the whole bigness of everything.”

As a self-described introvert, the sudden prominence wasn’t entirely easy to deal with - another stress that was lessened by returning to her snowy island. “It’s such a small community. And where I live in Reykjavík, there are so many artists everywhere, all the time. I think we don’t really care about fame. So I think that does colour how I think of things. I don’t see a lot of value in fame.”

Being watched, receiving attention onstage, is, however, an intrinsic part of the job. “But it’s different, because that’s a performance. It’s really interesting to me, because naturally I am quite an introvert, but when I’m with the guys and when we’re playing, I get to experience this whole other side of me that is like a kid who wants to be seen, and is just being playful onstage and feeling a lot of emotions and getting to put them on display. But then, when I am in my personal life, I don’t really want to be seen.”

Being a front-person - and, further, being a woman in music - leads to a particular kind of scrutiny. “You do get a certain kind of attention,” she says diplomatically, and then swallows more coffee, before divulging a recent anecdote.

The other day, she was playing with the band in Europe and had a couple of close friends of hers - two women - open for the show. “I find myself now in more environments where I’m with women. Because I’ve usually only been surrounded by men - I'm constantly surrounded by men. And it colours the way that I perceive things, and the way that I am perceived, maybe.

“And then I was with my two friends, and we were talking to the sound guy. And the exchange was jarring. It was so misogynistic, the way that he talked to them, I had never experienced someone talking to me like that. And then I realised, there’s constantly a wall of guys behind me. And when I say something, it has more weight - people think, ‘Oh, there are all these men backing her up.’

“But when it was just us three girls standing there, explaining what we needed, it was so… We were being dismissed completely, and I’d never experienced that with the band behind me. It was interesting to me.”

Nanna initially performed solo, under the name Songbird, before forming Of Monsters And Men. “I really did enjoy that, and it was a huge part of me, but along the way, I also enjoyed the idea of being in a band and being a part of something and making something with other people. I get really drawn to good creative dialogue.”

A good creative dialogue is also something she feels she has built with her audience. It keeps old songs that she has played live countless times before - songs like Little Talks, for example - fresh and exciting.

“The thing is, a song like that changes,” she explains. “When I hear it now, it sounds different from how we used to play it. We haven’t changed the arrangements, but now we have layers of all these years, which add to the music.

“I’m really grateful that we have a song like that, because it did open up a lot of doors for us, and then you see the connection that people have to that song. The people in the crowd, it really does resonate with them, which is so incredible. Every time you go on and play it, people react to it, and then you react to it, and then it just snowballs and becomes a new thing each time.”

Nanna knows it is a blessing to be able to have these layered years - these varied phases of life - add to one’s music, and to be able to take all of it on the road with you - even if the flight is long.

Of Monsters And Men will tour Australia this month. Tickets are now available.

Presented by Chugg Entertainment & Frontier Touring