After six years, Icelandic indie-folk rock band Of Monsters And Men are back with their fourth full-length studio album, All is Love and Pain in the Mouse Parade. In the time that passed, their beautiful fairytale sound and vivid imagery have matured into something with more depth and introspection. Instead of grand mountains and oceans, Of Monsters and Men have shifted their focus – zooming in on the quiet triumphs and tragedies of the mundane. They’ve kept that element of fantasy and wonder – the very thing that made their first three albums so captivating – but have applied their compelling storytelling to real life, creating an album that feels far more raw and emotionally resonant. The album is wild and alive, inviting you to dive deeper – to sit with the melody, to ask questions, to find whole narratives between the lines.
Sonically, this album feels like a satisfying culmination of the ones that came before it. It smoothly blends the goosebump-raising orchestral swells and sylvan vibe of My Head Is An Animal (2012) and Beneath The Skin (2015) with an electronic feel, drawing from the more modernised soundscape of synths and heavier percussion from Fever Dream (2021). Pulling it all together are the characteristic layered harmonies, chant-like singalong choruses, and buoyant, quick-moving instrumentation. It’s nice to see the band continue to mature and grow, offering us a taste of a more developed, dynamic sound.
At the heart of this album lies a very simple belief: stories of everyday love and pain are just as important – if not more worthy of attention – as any majestic and monumental epic. For me, this message is most poignantly and heartbreakingly realised in the title track ‘Mouse Parade’. The eerie, ethereal, and haunting song was inspired by the mice that turned to the band’s studio to shelter from the cold during the album’s recording sessions. Instead of seeing these creatures as invading pests, Of Monsters and Men did what they do best: showing compassion and sensitivity, they found a story, a moving narrative where others would not. This was explained by lead vocalist Nanna Bryndís Hilmarsdótti in an October 2025 interview with Flood Magazine: “We kind of imagined that you would travel beneath the floorboards and we wanted this song to feel like you were hearing what was going on upstairs from the perspective of these mice who have their own history and their own experiences with love and pain and all these things.”
These displaced mice speak in simple, broken dialogue delivered in a whispering chorus of plaintive voices. The chilling quaver of the violin throughout creates a solemn, melancholic atmosphere to match. The mice highlight their happiness before their lives are turned upside down: in the wild, where “all is love”, they are “warm”, with their “tables set” until “one day, winter came” and they are forced to “make a mouse parade”. Suddenly, they find themselves in a hostile, foreign habitat where they learn to fear new threats (“dog bad”) and must accept that in their new home, “all is love and pain”. Suddenly, the story of these mice doesn’t seem too different from what some of us humans have to go through – their pain and suffering mirrors our own. By so beautifully embodying a different perspective, Of Monsters and Men powerfully remind us to stay kind and sympathetic to other living beings, no matter how small.
Like the “mouse parade”, the album is peppered with thought-provoking, poetic metaphors and similes drawn from mundane things. The track ‘Tuna in a Can’ explores mental health struggles and feelings of depersonalisation. The opening lyrics are deceptively simple, yet contain a much deeper concept – “Tuna in a can, sticky from the brine / I thought I’d gone bad, you thought I was fine”. Of Monsters and Men takes the everyday experience of getting someone to double-check if food has gone bad and uses it to explore what it means to be insecure and unsure of who you are. In another track – ‘Fruit Bat’ – the natural simile “we’re like bunny and the reptile” is used to represent the fundamental compatibility of a romantic relationship. The more vulnerable and soft partner (bunny) laments to the more independent, cold-blooded partner (reptile) that they “always need something you don’t seem to need” and feel like a “fruit-bat hanging tight”, upside down from a tree. These rich, layered images bring the stories and emotions of the album to life in a painfully vivid way, helping the listener relate and identify with experiences they may never have had in real life.
Even when the instrumentation ramps up with grandeur and energy, the focus of the lyrics stays grounded in melancholy normalcy. For example, in ‘Television Love’, we get heavier drums, flashes of cymbals, and repeated, crescendoing melodies. But the lyrics are a hazy web of mundane memories. These snapshots are of real life: you’re “standing in the parking lot, maybe in the corner shop” or “walkin’ to a favourite song” and “looking strong” until you see an ex “at a traffic stop” and start to spiral. An experience like this is nothing special, nothing noteworthy, but in the moment, when it happens to you, it feels world-changing. And that feeling – of gravity in commonplace – is what this album seeks to personify.
The final song – ‘The End’ is the perfect conclusion to this fascinating change of perspective. Set in a world full of large-scale chaos and crisis, it serves as an invitation to come back to yourself from time to time. The opening verse sets up this apocalyptic earth – the “morning news” is full of reports that “the world is endin’” and “something’s kinda fallin’ from the sky”. The narrator himself is trapped in contemplating lofty concepts like how the “world revolves around a dyin’ sun”. Until there is a gentle call back to quiet, peaceful domesticity as “Mamma put the kettle on, made coffee and then said/Come on, darlin’/Why’s your mind so far from me now?”. It’s a simple yet much-needed reminder that “it’s alright in the end”.
Where earlier albums reached for more mythic and elemental themes, All is Love and Pain in the Mouse Parade finds beauty in the everyday. It encourages us to look at our surroundings and self in more detail and see the wealth of stories in every speck. Gentle, contemplative, and evocative – it is an album you will continue to think about, long after the final notes sound.
Words by Jui Zaveri
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