It’s a fitting time to be chatting with Nanna Bryndís Hilmarsdóttir, female lead of Icelandic juggernauts Of Monsters And Men.
We have recently farewelled the triple j Hottest 100 for another year, but back in 2012 the band was just pipped for the number one position by Macklemore and Ryan Lewis. Even so, ‘Little Talks’ cemented Of Monsters And Men’s presence not just in Australia, but led to debut album My Head Is An Animal reaching the tops of charts across the globe. Not bad for a track that first gained attention via a small recording filmed in somebody’s living room. Hilmarsdóttir reflects on where the band is today, and why it’s sometimes necessary to simply step back and breathe in the frozen night sky air.
“I’m good, hi, hello!” Hilmarsdóttir laughs, sounding happily flustered. “Sorry, I’m good. I just took a really sturdy walk – sturdy walk? What am I saying? But it’s really, really cold outside right now and I was panicked, because my phone actually died from how cold it is. It went from 20 per cent suddenly to one per cent and then just died! So I had to run back to make this phone call.”
As Hilmarsdóttir paints this portrait of a standard Icelandic evening, I am on a balcony sweltering in 40-degree heat. Extreme as her temperatures sound, it’s hard not to feel a pang of sweaty envy.
“It’s really nice to come home to your own environment,” the singer/guitarist says. “I feel like right now is such a good time to be writing, and we’re home now for two months, which is great. I think everyone here is cursing Iceland right now, but I love it.
“Touring life can be very… it’s weird, because you’re very busy but also not. Your whole status revolves around playing the show, so while there’s time between, it just gets sucked up. I think we definitely had to learn how to exist as a band and be active. You always feel like you have this time, you should create, you should be active, and you just end up not doing anything. It’s strange, but I think you have to just exist in that craziness, just go with it. That’s probably why Iceland becomes very important to me. You go home and breathe.”
As sabbaticals go, this one is certainly well earned. Hilmarsdóttir and her four bandmates have been yo-yoing from swerve of shore to bend of bay lately, with performances across the breadth of North America and Europe prior to heading back to the US, South America, Australia, Africa – it’s an itinerary that brings tears to your eyes. And all of this thanks to an inauspicious living room in Reykjavík.
“The way that we started was kind of that living room session,” Hilmarsdóttir says. “Seeing that [footage] is seeing very much how we functioned at that time. We would meet in my living room, hang around and make music, drink beers and have a good time. It was really nice when [Seattle radio station] KEXP came over doing Iceland Airwaves, and they said, ‘Hey, we’ll come tomorrow and do a session,’ and we just ran it from the living room because that’s where we usually were. And when people saw that video and started connecting to it, they were very much [connecting] to our world at that time.
“I really like talking to fans – I think we have really cool and interesting fans and I like interacting with them. Like that remix thing we did. It’s so cool that we can be like, ‘Hey, we have this song, do you want to be creative and do something cool with it?’ And the things that we got out of it were so amazing.”
The song in question is ‘Wolves Without Teeth’ from the band’s second album Beneath The Skin, which saw fans compete in submitting their own remixes of the track. It illustrates that despite the commercial and critical success the band has enjoyed, Of Monsters And Men are still very much a protean act. They have developed at an incredible rate, and the colour of their catalogue, the depth of their sound, is remarkable. But Hilmarsdóttir feels certain the band has more shape-shifting to come; indeed, it may never settle on a final form, and that’s exactly the way she would have it.
“I think we still haven’t figured out who we are, but I also don’t think you’re ever supposed to get to that place. I don’t really know when we’re going to make the next album or what we’re going to be feeling like then. I feel like it’s important for us to keep an open mind, and to figure out [who we] are more and more, because I have no idea. No idea at all. People ask me all the time – ‘Oh, so what kind of band are you in?’ And I feel like I could say this, and this, and this, and then all of that could just change again.
“I think we’re just getting through the winter, and finishing touring. But in all of our minds we’re thinking about it. We’ve started writing a little bit, started piecing things together. We’re all slowly getting ready for the next chapter. But you shouldn’t always be thinking ahead of yourself. You should just be enjoying things while they happen.”
Of Monsters And Men’sBeneath The Skin is out now through Republic/Universal; and they play the Concert Hall, Sydney Opera House, Sunday May 1 and Monday May 2.
