Of Monsters & Men

“All Is Love and Pain in the Mouse Parade.”
That may sound a little strange, but the title — and beating heart — of Icelandic indie-folk collective Of Monsters and Men’s fourth album hits a lot closer to home than you might expect.

A tapestry of stories, moments, and conversations, the album explores how love and pain intertwine — feelings that may seem at odds with one another, yet co-exist and even rely on each other. Its tales range from the loneliness and longing of living in an apartment block surrounded by strangers, to missed connections in a grocery store, to the imagined lives and losses of a community of mice in a vacant winter house.

Co-singers and lyricists Nanna Hilmarsdóttir and Ragnar Þórhallsson often found themselves telling stories from two different perspectives. The album grapples with “the duality of things — where there’s love, there’s bound to be pain. You really can’t have one without the other,” says Nanna. “It’s inspired by our lives, our family, our community, and the generations that came before us. Our lives, along with theirs, make up the Mouse Parade.”

“In some ways it’s an album about growing up, but in other ways it’s also about returning home by making peace with the past,” Ragnar adds.

In the six years since their last LP Fever Dream, the band have had time to take stock. Touring until the pandemic put everything on hold, the quintet released an EP and a documentary before embarking on solo projects — including starting families. The pause offered a necessary break from the cycle they had been in since “Little Talks” exploded in 2011.

“After 10 years of constantly being on the album-and-tour cycle, it was a re-evaluation,” Nanna says. “It was a moment to step back and go, ‘Oh, we’re adults now.’ We were settling into a life that wasn’t just life as a band. It was definitely time for a rethink.”

Living in Iceland, a small, close-knit community, the bandmates never drifted far from one another. When it came time to begin their next record, they chose to shift their surroundings and go without a label for a while to “rediscover the connection we felt when we were starting out.” The sound followed that intention — an effort to “have fun and get that core feeling back,” Ragnar explains.

“We’d usually meet in the studio around 10 each morning, brew a bad pot of coffee, and talk about everything and nothing before diving into the music.”

“It took us, on and off, around two years to record the album,” Ragnar shares. “We’re slow pokes in the studio because we love revisiting songs, making new versions, adding layers and little moments. It’s important to us that you can hear the sense of time passing in the music.”

Nanna agrees: “We wanted this album to feel like a band coming together to play — to lean into the band’s chemistry and embrace the chaos that comes with that. It felt important to be on the floor, playing together.”

That pure, primal chemistry forms the foundation of All Is Love and Pain in the Mouse Parade, created in a spirit of openness and letting the songs find their own shape. “It meant embracing imperfections and not overthinking it,” Ragnar explains.

“We set out to make something hopeful while the world seems to continually spiral into chaos,” Nanna continues. “Iceland plays a huge role in this album and has always been an anchor for us. Making this album allowed us to get lost in our own world and return to the core feeling of being a band. It reminded us of the early days — except now with growing families and life pulling us in different directions.”

The album explores how we coexist and connect, weaving “conversations stretched across time” that trace loneliness, relationships, and the threads between past and present. Self-produced by the band — with help on select tracks from Josh Kaufman (The National, Bob Weir, Bonny Light Horseman) and longtime friend, engineer, and collaborator Bjarni Þór Jensson — the record carries an unmistakable warmth.

Lead single “Television Love” captures this beautifully. “When we wrote it, we’d work on it for a while, then leave it, then return to it in different stages of our lives,” says Nanna. Ragnar adds: “It reminds me of how people used to send letters. You’d say as much as possible, then a year later the reply comes with all the answers. It’s romantic.”

Elsewhere, the band confront isolation and unrealized potential on “Tuna in the Can,” struggle to make sense of spiraling thoughts on “Kamikaze,” bask in the summer yearning of “Ordinary Creature,” and search for home on “Styrofoam Cathedral.” Each track wrestles with meaning and community in an effort to bring us closer together.

“The world actually is ending and we just carry on living anyway,” they say of closing track “The End.” Amen. It’s another epic yet intimate entry from a band entering a new chapter while celebrating where they came from — still, at heart, the same friends who wrote “Little Talks,” a song that went on to amass hundreds of millions of streams.

“We’ve had all the emotions about that period. Sometimes you want to fight against it, but now we’re just appreciative that we had that moment,” says Nanna of the early whirlwind — one they’ve sustained through critical acclaim and new generations of fans across what will soon be four albums.

“There’s a core of people who grew up on us and have a deep connection to our music,” Ragnar concludes. “We’ve been following each other through life. It’s beautiful — people say they feel like they’re reconnecting with an old friend. That’s how I feel too, when we haven’t released a song for a while.”