Of Monsters and Men returned to Boston Dec. 3, but their performance felt different from when they were last here in 2019. The band took to the stage at a near sold-out Roadrunner for the penultimate show of the North American leg of the band’s “The Mouse Parade Tour,” and they showed just how much they have evolved in the past six years.
The band visited Boston in support of their fourth album “All is Love and Pain in The Mouse Parade,” released Oct. 17. This was the band’s first album released in six years. The show was emblematic of the new direction which the band took with the album, far closer to folk than the stadium rock of their previous album, 2019’s “FEVER DREAM.” The concert opened with “Television Love,” the lead single for their newest album, a slow burning song. This was far more focused on the talents of lead singers Nanna Bryndís Hilmarsdóttir and Ragnar Þórhallsson, as opposed to the drum and guitar-driven rock of “FEVER DREAM.”
Þórhallsson described how the band saw this new focus as a major source of improvement for them. They joked during the concert about how the band frequently used repetitions and variations of “la la la” in place of coming up with new lyrics.
However, the new direction was clearly something concert attendees were not as keen on. This was proved by the major difference in crowd enthusiasm when the band went into “King and Lionheart,” one of the band’s early hits from their first album, 2011’s
“My Head is an Animal.” Indeed, the “All is Love and Pain in the Mouse Parade” is by far Of Monsters and Men’s commercially weakest album, being the band’s first album to not make it in the Billboard Top 10.
Yet, the band included nine of the album’s 13 tracks in their Boston set, creating a different and less energetic vibe than previous tours with the album’s slower paced songs. The band also changed the setlist significantly from previous tours to reflect the new vibe, and even the arrangements of some songs.
“Alligator,” the lead single from “FEVER DREAM,” was the most notable example of the changes made on this tour. On the “Fever Dream” tour, the album was used as a stadium rock opener, yet in Boston, this was greatly toned down with an arrangement that made the song noticeably quieter and slower. Only a handful of songs towards the end of the show, most notably “Little Talks,” the band’s 2011 megahit, and newer songs “Visitor” and “Fruit Bat,” contained the energy fans Of Monsters and Men grew to know and love from previous tours.
The featuring of “All is Love and Pain in the Mouse Parade” also meant that many of the band’s well-beloved songs were not included on the tour. For example, neither “Six Weeks” nor “Yellow Light,” both from “My Head is an Animal,” were included on the tour’s setlist, despite having been used to close out nearly every Of Monsters and Men concert in the band’s history, according to Setlist.fm.
The band would include a surprise in the Boston show, with “From Finner,” from “My Head is an Animal,” being a gift to the audience, as the Boston show was postponed in November due to Hilmarsdóttir’s illness at the beginning of the tour.
While the concert lacked many of the songs and energy that fans perhaps expected, the band still excelled in playing. Drummer Arnar Rósenkranz Hilmarsson, in particular, played well to match the vibes of the songs, in addition to lead singers Hilmarsdóttir and Þórhallsson excelling throughout.
It is always enjoyable to see a band following the direction that they want to see to new and different places. Very often with bands like Of Monsters and Men, the opposite will happen, bands usually stick to playing a single hit album. For example, in 2024, Northern Irish rock band Two Door Cinema Club also played a show at Roadrunner, but inversely to Of Monsters and Men, they played the entirety of their hit first album “Tourist History,” and only four songs from their latest two albums. While the past is nice, it’s always more fun to see a band go into the future.
