Of Monsters and Men

A battle of the bands in Garðabær

Of Monsters and Men started in 2010 in Garðabær, a town on the edge of Reykjavík. Nanna Bryndís Hilmarsdóttir had been playing alone under the name Songbird and asked Brynjar Leifsson and Ragnar Þórhallsson to help her fill out the songs. When the group was invited to enter Músíktilraunir, Iceland's annual battle of the bands, drummer Arnar Rósenkranz Hilmarsson joined, and the quartet won the 2010 competition. Bassist Kristján Páll Kristjánsson completed a line-up that has not changed since; accordion and keyboard player Árni Guðjónsson left in 2012.

The break came through a radio session rather than a campaign. A live recording of Little Talks made for the Seattle station KEXP spread online in the United States, and a Philadelphia station began playing the single in August 2011. It climbed to number 20 on the Billboard Hot 100 and topped the Icelandic chart. The debut album, My Head Is an Animal, came out in Iceland in September 2011 and in the United States in April 2012 through Record Records and Universal, and went to number one at home. By 2013 the band had won a European Border Breakers Award, the prize given to acts whose debut travels beyond their own country.

Three records and a billion streams

The second album, Beneath the Skin, arrived in June 2015 and won the band two Icelandic Music Awards that year: Pop Song of the Year for Crystals and Live Performer of the Year. Þórhallsson has been candid about it since. Speaking to The Line of Best Fit in July 2019, he said he loved the record and the step it represented, but thought it was too heavy and serious for the band.

Fever Dream, released in July 2019, was the correction. Writing began in 2016, and around 70 songs were drafted before the band went into the studio in May 2017. The method had changed: instead of jamming in a room, members wrote alone in home studios on computers, which Hilmarsdóttir said let her put desperation and anxiety into the lyrics without compromise. Only a handful of the drafts survived, among them Alligator and Ahay. The album reached number one on the Billboard Top Rock Albums chart, and the band set off on a three-month North American and European tour before a planned headline slot at Iceland Airwaves in November 2019.

In October 2017 they had become the first Icelandic band to pass a billion streams on Spotify, a marker of how far Little Talks and Dirty Paws had carried beyond the folk circuit.

Six years, a solo record and a self-made album

The Fever Dream tour was cut in half by the pandemic. In an interview with Songwriting Magazine published on 17 October 2025, Hilmarsdóttir described the years that followed as simultaneous and somewhat chaotic: the band began working on new material while members pursued other projects and their lives moved on. Her own solo debut, How To Start A Garden, came out in 2023. She said it let her work in quieter territory and keep control of specific arrangements, something she found hard inside the band's dynamic. Her line on band songwriting was blunt: you have to really let go of your ego.

The band signed with Red Light Management in December 2024. Television Love, released in July 2025, was their first original release in three years; Ordinary Creature followed in August. The fourth album, All Is Love and Pain in the Mouse Parade, was released on 17 October 2025, six years after Fever Dream. The band recorded it themselves in Iceland, with engineer Bjarni Þór Jensson shaping the sound. One track, Fruit Bat, was co-produced with Josh Kaufman, who pushed the band to play together live in the studio rather than layering parts separately. Three songwriters share the credits, with Hilmarsdóttir and Þórhallsson frequently working on both music and lyrics together.

Reviewing the album for When The Horn Blows on 15 October 2025, Hollie Carr called it the band's most introspective and sonically polished work to date. She heard the sweeping choruses and layered harmonies still in place, but with a new sleekness that glosses over the rawness of the early releases. Ordinary Creature, the ninth track, was singled out for breaking the contemplative mood with a jolt of rhythm, and the title track for what she called the record's most haunting moment.

Where they stand in September 2026

The touring cycle for the album has been long and geographically wide. A UK run in February 2026 took in Manchester's Albert Hall on 15 February and two nights at the Roundhouse in London on 17 and 18 February. The summer brought North American festival and amphitheatre dates, including Red Rocks in Colorado on 6 August 2026, the Edmonton Folk Festival and the Cigale festival in Québec.

As of early September 2026, Songkick lists 17 upcoming shows. The immediate run is North American: Ottawa's CityFolk festival on 16 September, the RBC Amphitheatre in Toronto on 17 September, the Green at Shelburne Museum in Vermont on 20 September, the State Theatre of Ithaca on 22 September, SummerStage in New York's Central Park on 23 September, Bourbon and Beyond in Louisville, the Georgia Theatre in Athens on 26 September and House of Blues Orlando on 28 September. The band has moved from the arena-scale bookings of the Fever Dream era to a mix of theatres, city parks and festival bills, which suits the more inward material.

The show in 2026

The current live band is a seven-piece. Alongside Hilmarsdóttir, Þórhallsson and the core members, Nordic Music Central's David Bentley counted engineer Bjarni Þór Jensson and Steingrímur Karl Teague among the touring musicians at Manchester's Albert Hall on 15 February 2026. The set there ran to 18 songs plus a two-song encore, drawn from all four albums but weighted to the new one, and Bentley noted the running order was standardised for the tour with few nightly changes. The stage was small for that many players, and the lighting was kept to subdued blues that he found surreal and otherworldly. One thing he missed: there were no brass players, so the trumpet line from Little Talks came from elsewhere in the arrangement.

The Roundhouse set on 18 February 2026, as logged on setlist.fm, opened with Television Love and Dream Team before dropping into King and Lionheart and Tuna in a Can. Alligator, Human, The Block, The Actor and Empire filled the middle, then the title track Mouse Parade led into Dirty Paws, Crystals, Ordinary Creature and Styrofoam Cathedral. Little Talks came late in the main set rather than at the end, followed by Visitor. The encore was The End and Fruit Bat. In Manchester the encore paired the gentler Love, Love, Love with Fruit Bat, whose synth weight Bentley described as almost overwhelming.

Fellow Icelander Arny Margret opened the London shows. Brendan Sharp, reviewing the second Roundhouse night for When The Horn Blows, described a production built on silhouette and shadow, with the band moving from hushed introspection into what he called thunderous communal release. The horn line of Little Talks mid-set produced a call-and-response from the floor, and Empire drew the loudest singing of the night. His verdict was that they are masters of scale and comfortable in contrast, and that this was a band at their peak. Bentley, who had seen a weary performance from them in 2019, wrote that the winning version of the band was back, and that the mass bow at the end almost took the roof off.