Music / Of Monsters and Men

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Of Monsters and Men is an Icelandic (but English-language) folk-pop band, formed in 2010 after Nanna Bryndís Hilmarsdóttir decided to add to her solo project Songbird, changing name after co-vocalist/guitarist Ragnar Þórhallsson came up with it. Their big break started with a winning the annual music competition Músíktilraunir in 2010 after just a week of working together, and subsequently they went viral after Seattle radio station KEXP recorded them performing in Raggi's living room.

Definitely not to be confused with Of Mice & Men.

Members

• Nanna Bryndís Hilmarsdóttir - vocals, guitar
• Ragnar "Raggi" Þórhallsson - vocals, guitar
• Brynjar Leifsson - guitar
• Arnar Rósenkranz Hilmarsson - drums
• Kristján Páll Kristjánsson - bass

Discography

• My Head Is an Animal (Studio album, 2011 in Iceland, 2012 elsewhere)
• Into the Woods (EP, 2011)
• Live from Vatnagarðar (Live album, 2013)
• Beneath the Skin (Studio album, 2015)
• Fever Dream (Studio album, 2019)
• Tíu (EP, 2022)
• All is Love and Pain in the Mouse Parade (Studio album, 2025)

Though the truth may vary, this ship will carry our tropes safe to shore:

• Album Closure: Most of All is Love and Pain in the Mouse Parade is a moody album about longing, loneliness, and relationships that are slowly drifting apart. "The End" closes out the album on a gentle acoustic number, with the singer expressing hope that they might come back together some day.
  But that’s alright with me, such is gravity
  Everything around here must come down eventually
  Come on darling, come on back to me somehow
• Album Title Drop:
  • "Six Weeks":
    She follows me into the woods
    Takes me home...
  • "Dirty Paws":
    Jumping up and down the floor
    My head is an animal...
  • "Human":
    Plants awoke and they slowly grow
    Beneath the skin...
  • "Alligator":
    Wake me up
    I'm fever dreaming...
• Audience Participation Song: "Little Talks", "From Finner", "Dirty Paws", "Slow Life", "Black Water". They sure like to shout "hey" or "whoa" a lot, don't they?
• Boléro Effect: "Slow and Steady", "From Finner", "Your Bones", and more traditional examples in "Yellow Light", "Thousand Eyes", "Lonely Weather", "Fruit Bat" — each of them songs with repetitive endings that grow more and more intense over time.
• Bolivian Army Ending: The music video for "King and Lionheart" ends with the two siblings still separated, and the elder sister running from her captors.
• Call-and-Response Song: Since the band has two lead singers there are quite a number of these, such as "Little Talks".
• Call-Back:
  • "Stuck In Gravity" includes a nod to the band's first album in its chorus.
    Head is still an animal...
  • That song, in turn, is referenced in "The End":
    But it's alright to be stuck in gravity...
• The Cameo: The group appear in two episodes of Game of Thrones, playing stage musicians at the Braavosi play featuring an actress Arya is ordered to kill.
• Concept Video: Most of their music videos thus far have been highly experimental, and frequently have little to do with the song lyrics.
  • "Little Talks" and "King and Lionheart" are both done in a Nordic art style, blend CGI and live action, and tell stories set in fantastic lands.
  • "Crystals" is a somewhat bizarre video featuring the band members as workers in a crystalline forge, creating an Artificial Human.
  • "Empire" is a black-and-white homage to Harold and Maude.
• Continuity Cavalcade: The video for "Phantom" is a tribute to My Head Is an Animal's 10th anniversary, and features several of the black-and-white landscapes from that album's lyric videos.
• Creator Thumbprint: Stormy seas and wild animals are their most common motifs.
• Deliberately Monochrome: The music videos for "Little Talks", "King and Lionheart", and "Empire".
• Driven to Suicide: One possible interpretation of "Little Talks".
  Just let me go, we'll meet again soon...
• Downer Ending: "Yellow Light" and the hidden track "Sinking Man" seem to be about a person meeting their cold, watery demise.
• Epic Rocking: "Fruit Bat" is over 8 minutes long.
• Hidden Track: "Sinking Man" follows "Yellow Light" after a few minutes of silence on the original version of My Head Is an Animal.
• Intergenerational Friendship: The two lead characters in the music video for "Empire".
• Interspecies Romance: Between a minotaur and a sea serpent in the video for "Love, Love, Love". Based on the lyrics, it's likely one sided.
• Lady and Knight: The narrator of "King and Lionheart" identifies the dynamic between the two main characters as Lord and Knight, probably in a metaphorical sense.
• Land, Sea, Sky: The creatures that menace the protagonists of the "Little Talks" video — first a giant two-headed bird (Sky), next a huge bison (Land) and finally a tentacled sea monster (Sea).
• Lyrical Dissonance: Very common:
  • "Little Talks" is about losing a significant other and dealing with the grief caused by it, yet you probably wouldn’t realize it because of how lively it is.
  • "Mountain Sound" seems to be about running away from the problems you’ve caused, but the instrumentation remains extremely cheerful throughout the entire song.
  • "Dirty Paws" could be interpreted as a retelling of World War II with forest animals.
• Lyric Video: In addition to their concept videos, the band has released lyric videos for each of their songs (excluding remixes).
• Male Band, Female Singer: An all-male band fronted by a woman.
• Mickey Mousing: Used to great effect in the "Little Talks" video. Many of the "Hey!"s are matched up to a significant moment of action, and much of the movement — such as the protagonists' walking, their arm movements when climbing the rope, and the ice cracking before the encounter with the sea monster — happens in time with the drumbeat.
• Monstrous Scenery: This is a prevalent motif in many of the Concept Videos for My Head is an Animal, as there's frequently a large beast either in the background or the actual setting of the action of the video. In "Numb Bears," the anteater that's seen walking throughout the video is actually walking atop a large, hairy beast which looks like a hill. In "Lakehouse" the mountain that the camera is panning over is actually a large monster with many eyes. In "Six Weeks," humanoid giants can be seen walking through the woods, but they don't seem to notice the traveller the song focuses upon. In "Yellow Light," many dinosaur-like bipedals can be seen traversing a desert landscape with their riders. In “From Finner”, a massive whale-like creature with a city on its back swims through a grey sea. In the “Little Talks” lyric video, breath plumes from the nostrils of one of the carved mountaintops in the background, implying it’s alive.
• Mouse World: The lyrics to "Mouse Parade" depict a colony of mice taking shelter an empty home during the winter, inspired by a similar incident in the band's cold Icelandic studio.
  Our home warm, tables set, all is love
  Shame, mouse parade
  One day, winter came, they go away
  Make mouse parade
• Non-Appearing Title:
  • "Sloom", "Six Weeks", "Sinking Man", "Alligator", "Vulture, Vulture", "Soothsayer", "Dream Team", "The Actor".
  • Partial cases: "From Finner", "Lakehouse", "I of the Storm", "Organs".
• Precision F-Strike:
  • While the band's songs are usually mellow lyric-wise, Fever Dream is their first album to have both a normal and a censored version, specifically for the chorus of "Under a Dome":
    Under a dome
    Where I met you first
    Fuck the way we were
  • "The Actor":
    Could that be my magnum opus?
    More like bullshit, my grandiosе tumor
• Pun-Based Title: "I of the Storm".
• Schizo Tech: In the music video for "King and Lionheart", the airships and war machines don't seem too out of place in the fantasy setting, but the stone temple that launches into the air like a spacecraft comes as a surprise.
• Shout-Out: The band's name is a play on the book Of Mice and Men.
• Siamese Twin Songs: In All is Love and Pain in the Mouse Parade, "The Block" segues directly into "Mouse Parade". The band describes the two songs as thematically linked, depicting two different events in the same place with the first song being from a human perspective and the second being somewhere beneath.
• Splash of Color:
  • In the music video for "Little Talks" everything is in black-and-white - except for the colorful girl and, as the ending reveals, the creatures from her country.
  • The video for "Phantom" has a colorful spirit traversing the various black-and-white realms from My Head Is an Animal's lyric videos.
• Sugar Apocalypse: "Dirty Paws" tells a story of birds and bees going to war. It becomes surprisingly dark, while maintaining a cheery melody throughout.
• Through the Eyes of Madness: "Little Talks" is about a young woman having a conversation with her dead husband.
• Turtle Island: The lyric video for the song “From Finner” features a gigantic whale-like creature with a city built on its back, swimming through a stormy gray sea.
• Vocal Tag Team: Nanna and Raggi tend to trade lead vocals back and forth every other song, and sometimes during the same song.
• War Is Hell: The war between The Birds and The Bees in "Dirty Paws" was not a pleasant experience for anyone involved. Although the tyrannical Bees were eventually defeated, the once green forest was "colored black" in the process.

My mother said I was always afraid of the dark
But I'm not, I don't mind
Having a ghost in my bed