A more mature Of Monsters and Men
Group grows up on second record
In the three years since Of Monsters and Men released its first album, the Top 20-charting My Head Is an Animal, guitarist Brynjar Leifsson says the Icelandic group has done some growing up.
“I moved four times,” Leifsson said during a recent interview in Toronto’s Horseshoe Tavern. “After the first album, we were excited about seeing a world that we hadn’t seen. Now, we’ve kind of been all over the place and in that whole time we took in a lot of things that made us grow. This album is more about growth, and we’ve kind of found our sound. We’re more focused on what the goal is and what we want the album to be.”
“And your hair turned grey,” jokes singer Nanna Bryndís Hilmarsdóttir, sitting nearby, of 24-year-old Leifsson’s dyed silver locks.
“It’s one of the 50 Shades of Grey,” he chuckles. “I’m an old man now.”
The pair — two out of the group’s five members — were in Toronto ahead of the release of their sophomore record, Beneath The Skin. The album is markedly different, Hilmarsdóttir says, in its lyrical content: Where My Head Is an Animal was mostly an exercise in storytelling of an almost mythical variety, Beneath The Skin sees the group looking directly inward.
“It was a new thing for (fellow singer Ragnar Þórhallsson) and I to be writing lyrics together, so we were trying to find a way to do it,” she says. “And the way that we found at first was telling stories. With this album, we realized that we wanted to challenge ourselves with writing more personal lyrics.
“For me, when I think about the two albums — I don’t know, I find this one to be a little more inverted,” she continues. “They both share that they’re very open, but open in a very different way. The first one is open because it’s exciting, and this one is open in a personal way.”
Hilmarsdóttir acknowledges that, on the surface, it’s a frightening prospect to suddenly be baring your soul onstage and through music, but for her, it’s natural. “You would think that it is intimidating,” she says. “But I feel like, when you’re singing something and when you’re putting something in a song ... when it’s out there, it’s just out there.”
But where the lyrical content diverges, Beneath The Skin is sonically similar to the group’s first, conveying the sort of baroque pop sensibilities that will be familiar to fans of homegrown talents Arcade Fire; it’s the sort of sound that grows and grows until it fills a room and sweeps you away, joyful, celebratory and melancholic in equal measure.
“I feel like there are two poles in our music,” Hilmarsdóttir says, “and it’s constantly dancing around. It balances itself out. A lot of it is us just very much enjoying it, and getting people to kind of feel something, to get them to go to some different place.”
The pair agrees that Of Monsters and Men’s strength here — building transportive, sweeping, sometimes otherworldly soundscapes — is one shared by numerous other acts from their native Iceland. The reason for that, Leifsson says, is simple.
“I think it’s just bad weather,” he says. “There’s not a whole lot to do. You don’t have all the obstacles you do in a big city. If you want to do something, you just go out and do it. There’s not tons of activities to get distracted. You just focus on one thing.”
“During the winter, when it’s almost at the darkest and there’s no sunlight, you just kind of stay inside, and a lot of people tend to make something,” Hilmarsdóttir elaborates.
“There’s so much space to do nothing, so you have to make something.”