“All Is Love and Pain in the Mouse Parade”, That may sound a little strange, but the title and beating heart of Icelandic indie-folk collective Of Monsters and Men’s fourth album hits a lot closer to home than you’d expect.

 

A tapestry of stories, moments, and conversations, the album explores how love and pain intertwine. Feelings that might seem at odds with each other, but co-exist simultaneously and need one another.

 

Tales both big and small — from the loneliness and longing of living in a block surrounded by strangers, to missed connections in a grocery store, to the lives and losses of a community of mice in a vacant house during winter.

 

Co-singers and lyricists Nanna Hilmarsdóttir and Ragnar Þórhallsson often found themselves telling stories from two different points of view. The album deals with “the duality of things — where there’s love, there’s bound to be pain. You really can’t have one without the other,” explains Nanna. “It’s inspired by our lives, our family, our community, and the generations that came before us. Our lives, along with theirs, make up the Mouse Parade.”

 

“In some ways it’s an album about growing up, but in other ways it’s also about returning home by making peace with the past,” Ragnar adds.

 

In the six years since the band’s last LP, Fever Dream, the Icelandic indie sensation has had time to take stock. Touring until the pandemic put things on ice, the quintet released an EP and a documentary before embarking on some solo projects — including having a few kids. It made for a much-needed breather from the treadmill they’d been on since the massive “Little Talks” blew up back in 2011.

 

“After 10 years of constantly being on the album-and-tour cycle, it was a re-evaluation of things,” admits Nanna. “It was about having a moment to step back and go, ‘Oh, we’re adults now.’ We were settling into a life that wasn’t just life as a band. It was definitely time for a rethink.”

 

Iceland is famously a small and tight-knit community, so the best friends were never far from one another. When the time came to start making their next record, they decided to shift their surroundings and go without a label for a while to “rediscover the connection we felt when we were starting out.” The sound and energy of the record followed suit in a bid to “have a lot of fun and get that core feeling back,” explains Ragnar.

 

“We’d usually meet up in their studio around 10 each morning, brew a bad pot of coffee and have a conversation about everything and nothing before diving into the music.”

“It took us, on and off, around two years to record the album,” shares Ragnar. “We’re usually slow pokes in the studio because we love revisiting songs, making new versions, and adding layers and little moments here and there. It’s important to us to really hear the sense of time passing in the music.”

 

Nanna agrees: “We wanted this album to feel like a band coming together to play — to lean into the band’s chemistry and embrace the chaos that comes along with that. It felt important for us to be on the floor, playing together.”

 

That pure and primal band chemistry laid the foundation for All Is Love and Pain in the Mouse Parade, under a spirit of openness and allowing the songs to find their own way once they’d captured the essence. As Ragnar reveals, that meant “embracing imperfections and not overthinking it.”

 

“We set out to make something that felt hopeful while the world seems to continually spiral into more chaos“ Nanna continues. “Iceland plays a huge role in this album and has always been an anchor for us. Making this album allowed us to completely get lost in our own world and get back to the core feeling of being a band and making music together. Creatively it reminded us of the times when we had just started the band but of course circumstances being a bit different now with growing families and life pulling us in different directions”

 

The back-to-basics vibe, the organic approach: it all got the band to thinking about how we coexist and connect. Running throughout the record are a series of “conversations stretched across time” that mull over loneliness, relationships and tracing a line between the past and the present. Self-produced by the band with help on a couple of tracks from Josh Kaufman [The National, Bob Weird, Bonny Light Horseman] and Bjarni Þór Jensson, long time friend, engineer and collaborator, the album drips with that hygge warm hug feeling. Take the ever-skyward emotion of wide-screen lead single ’Television Love’ . “When we wrote this song, we’d work on it for a while then we’d leave it alone to return to it in different stages of our lives,” says Nanna.

 

Ragnar agrees: “It reminds me of how people sent letters back in the day. You would try to say and ask as much in the letter as possible, then a year later a reply comes and you get all the answers. It’s romantic in a way.”

 

Elsewhere the band tackle isolation and not living up to your potential on ‘Tuna In The Can’, struggle to make sense of one’s own thoughts on ‘Kamikaze’, bask in the the summer yearning of ‘Ordinary Creature’ and try to find a place called home of ’Styrofoam Cathedral’, all wrestling with the sense and community in a bid to bring us all together.

 

“The world actually is ending and we just carry on living anyway,” they say of closing track ‘The End’. Amen. It’s another epic yet intimate affair from a band entering a new chapter while celebrating where they came from – still at heart those same friends that penned the colossal ‘Little Talks’ that would go on to score hundreds of millions of streams.

 

“We’ve had all the emotions when it comes to that period. Sometimes you want to fight against it, but now we’re just really appreciative that we had that moment,” says Nanna of their early whirlwind - one they’ve maintained with critical acclaim and new generations of fans across their soon to be four albums.

 

“There’s a core of people who grew up on us and have a deep connection to our music,” ends Ragnar. “We’ve been following each other, throughout life. It’s beautiful to see people who feel like they’ve been missing an old friend. That’s also how I feel when I haven’t released a song for a while.”

All Is Love and Pain in the Mouse Parade is released October 17th, 2025