Of Monsters and Men / My Head Is an Animal / 2011
King and Lionheart
defiant tenderness, anthemic resolve shading into communal catharsis
A folk-rock anthem built around a protective pact between two figures cast as royalty and guardian, set against vague but insistent imagery of fear and pursuit. The song never explains what threat it's resisting, which lets the king/lionheart metaphor stand for almost any loyalty under siege.
loyalty and protection collective defiance fear personified as external threat steadfastness through change chosen family or partnership
Who's speaking
A first-person speaker addresses a 'you' cast as a king, positioning themselves as the lionheart who guards that king; the pronoun shifts from a plural 'we' early on to an intimate singular bond later, suggesting the song moves from a group's stance against outsiders to a closer, almost private vow
What happens
The song opens with a community refusing to be driven out of its town, asserting permanence against unnamed encroachment. It then narrows into a figurative journey past onlookers, with recurring ghostly threats in a fear-stacked landscape. The king/lionheart pairing is introduced as the anchor that survives distance and danger, building through sea imagery toward an apocalyptic vow of hand-holding loyalty, before dissolving into a chanted refrain that strips the song down to its central word.
How it's built
Verse-chorus form that gradually erodes into pure repetition: the first verse sets scene and stakes with triplicate-repeated phrases, the pre-chorus introduces the ghost/fear imagery, and the chorus delivers the king/lionheart declaration. Later verses mirror earlier ones but intensify the imagery (black sea, lurking creatures, world's end), and the song ultimately collapses into an extended chant of the title word, turning lyric into incantation.
Section by section
Opening verse
The song begins with a communal voice asserting it won't be pushed out of its town, establishing a tone of defiance before any specific relationship is named. The triple repetition of refusal phrases works like a chant of reassurance, more incantation than statement.uesday It's less about explaining the threat than about rehearsing resistance to it.since the specifics stay withheld, the listener is left to project whatever conflict feels relevant.so the song's vagueness becomes a feature, not a flaw.in the lines about ships sailing over bright city lights, there's a shift to a wider, almost cosmic vantage, as if watching the town's defiance from above.this zoom-out primes the leap into myth that follows.quote not needed here.commentary trimmed.final note: the verse sets stakes as communal before the song narrows to a pair.
Pre-chorus: ghosts and mountains
Fear is given a body here, described as something that reappears and piles up like terrain. By making dread into landscape, the song gives the listener something tangible to imagine being protected from, even without specifics.unlike news forums
First chorus
The king/lionheart pairing lands as the song's emotional center, a compact image of hierarchy reframed as mutual devotion rather than subservience.the lionheart isn't beneath the king so much as fiercely bound to him.this is where the song's central device first fully appears, and it carries weight precisely because it's left metaphorical rather than explained.quote: a king and i'm a lionheart
Second verse: crown and onlookers
The imagery of a crown lighting a path and figures left behind watching introduces a sense of leaving a former life or crowd, suggesting the couple's bond sets them apart from or ahead of others.the refrain about staying the same despite distance reinforces continuity as the song's core value.quote: we're still the same
Escalation: sea and world's end
The threat imagery intensifies from mountains to an ominous sea with creatures beneath, before the song pushes to its most extreme frame, the end of the world, to measure the depth of the vow.the promise to hold on through that extremity is the emotional peak, stated plainly rather than through metaphor, which makes it feel like the song's clearest moment of sincerity.quote: i'll be here to hold
Outro chant
The lyric dissolves into repeated iterations of the title word, shedding narrative for pure sound and collective singing.this structural choice turns the song into something closer to ritual than storytelling, inviting audience participation over interpretation.
Craft
- extended metaphor
- The king and lionheart figures stand in for a protected party and protector; the metaphor is sustained across verses and deepens through imagery of thrones, crowns, and guarding rather than being explained literally.
- anaphora
- Triple repetition of short phrases like refusals to run or wait creates a chant-like insistence, mimicking collective resolve through sheer reiteration rather than argument.
- personification
- Fear and dread are rendered as literal ghosts and lurking creatures, externalizing internal anxiety into a landscape that can be narratively confronted.
- symbolism
- The sea 'painted black' and creatures beneath the deck function as symbols of hidden danger or the unknown, raising stakes without specifying their real-world referent.
- apocalyptic imagery
- The invocation of the world ending heightens the loyalty vow to its furthest extreme, making the promise to hold on feel total rather than conditional.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats this as a song about fierce, unconditional loyalty to a partner or loved one, using medieval imagery (kings, crowns, lionhearts) to elevate an ordinary bond into myth, with the external threats (ghosts, dark seas, world's end) functioning as stand-ins for any hardship, rather than literal events. An alternative reading, given the band's frequent use of communal 'we' language and town imagery, is that the song is about a community's resistance to displacement or loss of place, with the king/lionheart pair representing two halves of a collective identity rather than romantic partners. Both readings coexist because the lyric never anchors itself to a specific referent, which seems to be a deliberate choice that has helped the song function broadly as an anthem.
Context
This track appears on Of Monsters and Men's debut album, which was heavily influenced by Icelandic landscape imagery and folk-tale tropes; the band's use of fantastical and mythic language throughout that record is well documented, though I don't have specific confirmed biographical detail about the writing of this particular song.
Listen for
- the shift from communal 'we' pronouns in the opening to the intimate 'you/I' pairing in the chorus
- the way fear is described through physical landscape imagery like mountains and dark seas
- the escalation from local threat to apocalyptic stakes by the song's end
- the structural collapse into a chanted refrain in the outro
- the dual male-female vocal interplay that could be heard as reinforcing the king/lionheart duality
About Of Monsters and Men
Of Monsters and Men is an Icelandic indie folk/rock band formed in Garðabær in 2010. It consists of lead singer and guitarist Nanna Bryndís Hilmarsdóttir, singer and guitarist Ragnar "Raggi" Þórhallsson, lead guitarist Brynjar Leifsson, drummer Arnar Rósenkranz Hilmarsson, and bassist Kristján Páll Kristjánsson.
2010 - present / Iceland
Full biography and catalogue