“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% suddenly to 1% 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 envy.
“It’s really nice to come home to your own environment,” she says. “Right now it’s really dark and cold and pretty depressing, and it has this certain feel to it. So 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.”
In my mind, Iceland is a kind of sleeted wonderland, full of endless snow-capped mountains, sheer frozen cliffs and Norse gods quaffing mead. The reality is just slightly different, but in that coveted downtime, Hilmarsdóttir’s days are more educational than mythological.
“I read a lot of comics, and I listen to podcasts. Podcasts have become my ultimate time killer. They’re perfect. My pick would probably be Serial right now. It’s such an insane thing. It sucks you in. I also listen to This American Life a lot. It’s good because you can be doing whatever, you know? You can be doing your dishes and listening to it, and it’s like, ‘Ahh, yes, information’.”
As sabbaticals go, this one is certainly well earned. Hilmarsdóttir and her four band mates have been yo-yoing from swerve of shore to bend of bay of late, with performances across the breadth of North America and Europe prior to heading to South America, Australia and 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 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 sophomore album Beneath the Skin, which saw fans have a crack at submitting their own remix of the track. It illustrates that despite the band’s commercial and critical success, Of Monsters And Men are still very much a protean act. They have developed at an incredible rate, and the depth of their catalogue is remarkable. But Hilmarsdóttir feels certain that the band have more shapeshifting to come.
“I think we still haven’t still 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.”
It doesn’t hurt that the band’s music videos are such flights of imagination. Each clip is an exercise in world building, in opening up visually sumptuous landscapes to lose yourself within. Of these, Crystal is a standout. The song has multiple official videos, but the version featuring Icelandic actor Siggi Sigurjóns seems to somehow capture that strange, unbridled celebration that the song promotes.
“Well, that was actually really funny how that one happened. We were sitting around chatting, thinking about doing lyric videos. We thought, ‘OK, we’ll have lyrics, we’ll do some kind of graphic stuff,’ but it all sounded pretty boring and we wanted to do something more. Someone came up with the idea of having people just there in front of the camera, just to sing. To do their own interpretation, have their own emotions come up. We did the video with Siggi, and then did a few more – I think ten or something – which was us telling them, ‘Imagine you’re at home in your room alone, you’ve just turned on this song, and what comes up.’ It was pretty interesting to see, because people have such different reactions to it. I still have different reactions to it myself.”
When Of Monsters & Men visited Melbourne in 2015, they sold out their sole show at the Forum before most people even had time to take out their wallets. Less than a year later, they’ll now be taking to the Palais Theatre across two nights. They’ve also just been announced as one of this year’s Glastonbury artists, which indicates they’re undoubtedly a band whose star is continuing to rise. It’s something Hilmarsdóttir is certainly conscious of, though she is reluctant to dwell too much on the shape of their future. Insatiable fans are already pleading for album #3, though with roughly three years between Beneath the Skin and their debut, they may be looking at a bit of a wait. In the meantime, Hilmarsdóttir remains happy and philosophical about the road ahead.
“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.”
BY ADAM NORRIS
