How’s the Icelandic winter treating you?
It’s been warm and nice, which is a bit strange - but I’m enjoying it!
The UK tour starts on 11th February 11 arriving at Rock City on 22nd February... You’ve always had such a great relationship with UK audiences. Where do you like to go when you come over?
When we released our album (All Is Love and Pain In The Mouse Parade) we did a little tour in October and the show on our release date was in Brighton. That was one of my all favourite shows I think. It was very intimate and very beautiful and I really like the city too.
What are your experiences of playing Nottingham in the past?
I think [Rock City] is a new one for us - but I’m also really bad with remembering venues! If you were to ask our guitar player (Brynjar Leifsson) he knows every single place we’ve played. He remembers everything and I’m just like this butterfly - he’s the historian.
When you formed in 2009 you were the focal point that the band grew from - is that right?
Yeah. I was playing shows here as a solo artist starting out and writing songs. I was trying to find my people to vibe with and I started asking Brynjar, who I went to school with, to play with me on some shows. We started rehearsing in his grandfather’s space that we could play in, then I moved to Reykjavik which was 40 minutes from where I lived and then I met Raggi (singer and guitarist) who was a childhood friend of theirs and it slowly started to build.
Was there a moment when you thought, "This is going to work"?
It just sort of happened gradually because back then we were just getting to know each other in our 20s having a good time partying and playing music.
You performed under the moniker Songbird as a solo artist - have you heard the Fleetwood Mac song and, if so, have you ever covered it?
It’s a beautiful song! I don’t think I have - it would be a good one to do.
You released a documentary to celebrate 10 years as a band - that must have been pretty special.
It was cool. We wanted to do something special to celebrate as we’re pretty bad at that in general and we’re trying to fix that! We had a friend, Dean DeBlois, who is a brilliant director and he went around Iceland filming us at places which had a special feeling for us. It was in the pandemic so we couldn’t play in front of people though. It came out in that weird time too so we had to send links to our friends and family so they could watch it.
You’re four studio albums in now, can you tell us a bit more about the title of the new one?
Yeah it comes from a song called The Mouse Parade on the album and another track The Block.
[It's about] this kind of human isolation where you travel beneath the floorboards of The Block and there’s this other world, the Mouse Parade. It’s about unity and feeling connected to your community. These two opposite songs show the themes of the album.
Storytelling is such a big part of Icelandic and Scandinavian life - has that always been in your life too?
Yeah. Here in Iceland we have these stories which are kind of like Grimm's fairytales, I collect them and have them at home - they’re from the 1800s and were written by this guy who would going around Iceland collecting stories about ghosts and elves, but there’s always this human element in there too, which I think is really interesting. I love storytelling, you know - having something you want to say but you put it into the context of a story, which gives it more layers and emotion to it.
Do you think storytelling makes songs more relatable to the listener?
Yeah. I think so, but also think fans do make up their own stories around the lyrics themselves too. They can pick up on things which are completely different to what we might have meant.
What are the challenges you face now compared to when you started out?
I mean I guess it is tricky in a lot of ways. The landscape has completely changed - I mean it is so much more expensive to tour. You kind of have to weigh up what you’re doing a bit more especially as we all live here in Iceland on an island and it’s expensive to leave it.
I guess it’s like having two different lives - a touring musician and then your everyday life in Iceland…
Yes. The comfort of being on the road where you are basically like a baby or a kid on a school trip where everything is taken care of and you just go and do your thing with no responsibilities. Then I come back home and I’m like what am I doing for dinner?
Are there songs on the new album which you think are going to translate really well in the live arena?
We wrote this album keeping in mind it should be a live experience. We hadn’t been touring for a while and we really missed it. So many of the songs have that feel with a few written with us all in the room on the floor so things could bleed into each other. So, it’s been really nice playing them live - a really good experience.
Of Monsters and Men perform at Rock City on 22nd February 2026.
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