By Sascha Brodsky

Of Monsters and Men arrived in Central Park Wednesday night with a useful problem: how does a band famous for one enormous communal anthem grow older without becoming its own tribute act?

The answer, at Central Park SummerStage, was to refuse the obvious chronology. The Icelandic group did not begin by reminding New York why it became famous. It opened with “Television Love,” from 2025’s All Is Love and Pain in the Mouse Parade, then moved through “Dream Team” and “Tuna in a Can” before reaching back to “King and Lionheart.” The sequence made the argument before anyone had to say it: the new record is not an intermission between old favorites. It is the reason for the tour.

That matters for Of Monsters and Men, a band whose early success was almost suspiciously complete. “Little Talks,” from the 2011 debut My Head Is an Animal, became the sort of song that escaped the album, the band and eventually its decade. The combination was irresistible: boy-girl vocals, trumpet, acoustic strumming, a chorus engineered for strangers to shout together. More than a billion Spotify streams later, it remains the song that can threaten to turn everything around it into prelude.

The Mouse Parade Tour is organized to resist that gravitational pull. Wednesday’s set mixed the first album with material from Beneath the Skin, Fever Dream and the new record, moving from “Kamikaze” and “Wild Roses” to “Styrofoam Cathedral,” “From Finner” and “Alligator.” The effect was less greatest-hits revue than a demonstration of how much the band’s scale has changed while its basic instincts have not.

A bigger shadow

Of Monsters and Men began with a sound that seemed to contain its own scenery. The songs suggested forests, mountains, animals and weather even when the lyrics were describing less picturesque human trouble. Nanna Bryndís Hilmarsdóttir and Ragnar Þórhallsson could sing to each other like characters who had wandered into the same folktale from opposite directions.

What has changed is the amount of darkness the band permits into the frame. The newer songs are roomier and stranger, less dependent on the stomping folk-pop machinery that became ubiquitous in the early 2010s. “Television Love” makes a particularly smart opener because it announces that shift without disowning the old band. There is still melody, still the pull between two voices, still the sense that a private feeling is being enlarged until a crowd can inhabit it.

Central Park was an apt setting for that balancing act. SummerStage sits in the peculiar middle ground between a city concert and an outdoor escape. The skyline is nearby but not quite the point. For a band whose music has always trafficked in imagined landscapes, playing inside Manhattan’s most elaborate piece of manufactured nature carries a nice symmetry.

The middle of the set made the band’s range especially clear. “From Finner,” from the debut, sits comfortably beside the harder-edged “Alligator,” released eight years later. “The Towering Skyscraper at the End of the Road,” meanwhile, belongs to the band’s current chapter and even its title sounds like a miniature Of Monsters and Men story: whimsical at first glance, ominous if you stay with it.

The old magic

Then came “Dirty Paws.” If “Little Talks” is the hit that became public property, “Dirty Paws” may be the better key to the band. It has the old mixture in concentrated form: a childlike premise, narrative oddness and music that keeps expanding until the fanciful starts to feel consequential. Its continued place deep in the set rather than at the beginning suggests a band comfortable letting nostalgia arrive on its own schedule.

That is the central pleasure of this version of Of Monsters and Men. Fifteen years after the group formed, it no longer has to choose between being the band that made My Head Is an Animal and the band that exists now. The catalog has become large enough for those identities to argue with each other.

There is a broader story here about the indie-folk boom that once surrounded the group. In the early 2010s, acoustic guitars, massed vocals and emphatic percussion briefly sounded like pop’s future. The formula became so successful that it turned into cliché. Of Monsters and Men survived partly because its best songs were always weirder than the formula. Beneath the handclaps and choruses were death, anxiety, beasts, empty houses and people failing to understand one another.

The newer material does not need to disguise those anxieties quite so thoroughly. All Is Love and Pain in the Mouse Parade puts the contradiction directly in its title. Love and pain are not opposing destinations. They are fellow travelers, marching together.

Wednesday’s concert was officially a stop on the Mouse Parade Tour, with August Ponthier opening the evening. The tour continues through North and South America after New York. But the Central Park date felt significant for another reason: it showed what can happen when a band outlives the cultural moment that first made it legible.

Of Monsters and Men does not sound like a relic of the indie-folk years because it has stopped trying to reproduce them. The huge choruses remain available when needed. So do the old songs. But around them is a stranger, more adult body of work, one less interested in forcing every feeling toward catharsis.

That makes the inevitable arrival of the familiar material more satisfying, not less. A song can be a time machine, but a concert should not have to be one. In Central Park, Of Monsters and Men made room for the past without moving back into it.

Of Monsters and Men played Central Park SummerStage on Sept. 23, 2026, with August Ponthier. Concert details were verified against City Parks Foundation and the published set list. Photographs are archival Creative Commons images and were not taken at the New York performance.