Singer Nanna Bryndís Hilmarsdóttir is on a stopover in Seattle when we talk, and I ask her how the band are adjusting to the high level of attention. “It’s been really crazy,” she says with a laugh, “because we’ve been on the road since March last year. I didn’t even know what touring was before this, so it’s definitely been a learning experience. I’ve always wanted to travel the world and play music, so I get to do both. It’s been a lot of fun, but touring has brought so much chaos, and I’m not used to that.”
As the only woman in the band, I ask Hilmarsdóttir what it’s like touring with a large group of men – the chaps from Of Monsters And Men do seem like the polite and well-scrubbed sort, but after enough time on the road, surely they’ve started to develop some fairly gross habits? Hilmarsdóttir laughs at the suggestion. “I’ve known the guys for a really long time, so honestly, it hasn’t been a really big change. Our trumpet player is a girl as well,” she continues, “so I have a go-to girl to get away from them if they’re being too gross of if I need a bit of a break! It’s nice, though, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
If there’s one quality that unites the songs on My Head Is An Animal, it’s a sense of joy and uplift, and I’m curious to know if these qualities are reflected in the band members themselves. “I think so, yeah,” Hilmarsdóttir says. “I mean, I think we have our ups and downs, and in the album too, the lyrics are often more…they’re a bit more moody than the instrumentals. I’d like to think that in general, we’re pretty happy people though.”
Taking it back to the beginning, Hilmarsdóttir credits the peace and quiet of Iceland with nurturing and inspiring her and the other members of the band as young musicians. “I’m a very calm person, and I really like the quiet and calm of Iceland. During the wintertime it’s dark and cold, and it really inspires me to write. When you’re touring, you’re always running around and it’s always crazy. Iceland is definitely inspiring, because when it’s too cold outside to do anything, your only option is to stay in and write a song.”
With a population in the low hundreds of thousands, Iceland does not have a lot of opportunities for young bands to get out and play, but Hilmarsdóttir and her bandmates found ways around this. “We would drive around the coastline of Iceland a lot,” she explains, “because there are a lot of small towns there where bands very rarely come to play. People would always be excited to see us, and there is so much beauty around the coastline of the country that it was always really inspiring to get out there and see it.”
In the past, Hilmarsdóttir has said that the song Little Talks was inspired by a house that she lived in, and the old couple who inhabited it before her, and I’m curious to ask more about this. “It was a really beautiful house,” she explains, “and it was very obvious when I looked at it for the first time that people had made their lives there. This old couple were the only other people to live there, and when people inhabit a house for that long, they leave parts of themselves behind. It was a beautiful house and I really loved living there – the song was written during that time, so it was definitely very inspiring, too.”
Of Monsters And Men were in Australia earlier this year for the Laneway Festival, and enjoyed a very warm welcome to the country. “It was great,” Hilmarsdóttir says. “We actually came before. I can’t remember when exactly, but it was winter time in Australia, which isn’t really very much like our winter at all, so that was very interesting. Laneway was very cool though. It was very cool to travel around the country with all of those bands and get to know each other.”
The band will return soon to play a set at Splendour In The Grass, and I ask Hilmarsdóttir what exactly we can expect from that. “I don’t know … I guess you’ll have to come and find out!” she says. “No, but really, we want people to be a part of the show, we want them to have fun, and we want them to feel like they’re the eighth member of the band, if you know what I mean. We want to try and get people involved, we want them to really have a good time.”
BY ALASDAIR DUNCAN
