All Is Love and Pain in the Mouse Parade

Six years after Of Monsters and Men’s previous full-length, the Icelandic rockers return with sprawling soundscapes and lush imagery to tackle questions about life, loneliness, longing and belonging, their atmospheric folk-rock—at times grand, at times intimate—on full display. <i>All is Love and Pain in the Mouse Parade</i> takes its name from “Mouse Parade”, a haunting reflection of collective experience. “That song is a little bit of an odd one out,” lead singer Nanna Bryndís Hilmarsdóttir tells Apple Music. “It tells the story of these mice in a vacant house that sounds pretty fantastical.” The album also dives poetically into the spectrum of emotions stemming from connecting with others: anxiety (“What a stunt I pulled/The thoughts, they smash against my skull,” Hilmarsdóttir sings on “The Actor”); insecurity (“Sticky from the brine/I thought I’d gone bad/You thought I was fine,” co-vocalist Ragnar Þórhallsson leads on “Tuna in a Can”); and yearning (“I wish I could run to your house/When it gets dark out,” the pair sing on “Ordinary Creature”). “The sense of community, which is kind of sprinkled all over this album,” Hilmarsdóttir says, “it’s a thing that we were really looking deeply at, and I think craving a little bit.”