Of Monsters and Men / My Head Is an Animal / 2011
Mountain Sound
urgent but hushed, anxious energy wrapped in folk-anthem warmth
A song about fleeing guilt rather than finding freedom: a narrator who has caused harm escapes into wilderness with a group of similarly damaged companions, and the anthemic chorus turns flight into a kind of nocturnal ritual. It trades confession for atmosphere, letting chant-like repetition stand in for resolution.
guilt and self-exile flight from consequence outsider community nature as refuge nocturnal ritual
Who's speaking
A first-person narrator speaking mostly to themselves or an unnamed collective ('we'), admitting culpability early on but never naming the offense; the voice feels sincere but evasive, more interested in motion than explanation
What happens
The song opens with an admission of wrongdoing and immediate flight, moves into solidarity with other wounded fugitives met along the way, registers a flicker of self-distinction from that group, then dissolves into pure chant and repetition as the narrative gives way to ritualized escape.
How it's built
Loose verse-chorus folk structure where the verses carry the scant plot and the chorus (built on call-and-response between a spoken instruction and a parenthetical refrain) swells to dominate the song, eventually crowding out narrative entirely in favor of wordless vocalizing.
Section by section
Opening verse
“packed my things and ran”
The song begins mid-crisis, with the act of leaving already underway. The vagueness of what was 'caused' keeps the listener oriented toward feeling rather than plot.
Pre-chorus
The image of traveling with nothing but a shadow suggests both isolation and a kind of self-haunting -- the narrator is accompanied only by their own guilt made visible.
Chorus
“we sleep until the sun goes down”
Inverting the normal rhythm of day and night turns sleep into hiding and darkness into the only safe time to move, reinforcing the sense of permanent evasion rather than arrival anywhere.
Second verse
The narrator meets others marked by visible wounds, implying a whole community of people running from their own pasts, which momentarily normalizes the narrator's guilt as shared condition.
Turn within second verse
Just as solidarity seems to form, the narrator notices a difference between themselves and the group, introducing a brief moment of alienation even within collective flight -- the song doesn't resolve this tension, just moves past it.
Outro vocalizations
The collapse into chanted syllables suggests the story has run out of words before it has run out of road, letting momentum and sound carry what plot no longer explains.
Craft
- call-and-response chorus
- The main lines are answered by parenthetical refrains about sleeping until dark, creating a layered, communal chant that mimics group movement through the woods.
- nature imagery as metaphor
- The woods and mountain function as both literal escape route and symbolic space outside ordinary judgment, where day and night reverse the normal order of hiding versus living openly.
- ambiguous culpability
- The narrator admits causing trouble but withholds specifics, which keeps the song emotionally resonant without pinning it to one concrete story.
- dissolution into vocables
- The ending reduces language to 'la la la' and wordless cries, enacting the way flight eventually outruns the need for explanation.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats this as a song about moral flight rather than literal crime -- the narrator's vague guilt and encounter with similarly scarred travelers suggest an allegory for shame, depression, or self-exile rather than an actual fugitive narrative. An alternative, folkloric reading hears it more literally as a chase/escape story, with the mountain sound functioning as an actual hiding place and the 'we' as co-conspirators, closer to a campfire adventure tale. The lyrics support both without confirming either, which is part of the song's appeal.
Context
This track appears on Of Monsters and Men's debut album 'My Head Is an Animal' (2011), a record steeped in folk-tale imagery, animal metaphors, and communal chant-based choruses typical of the band's early sound. I don't have confirmed biographical detail linking this specific song to a real event; the interpretation here is based on the text alone.
Listen for
- the shift from spoken-verse plainness to the layered call-and-response chorus
- the way the parenthetical refrain lines sit underneath the main vocal, creating a rounds-like texture
- the moment the lyric admits a difference between narrator and group, which passes almost unnoticed
- the final section's abandonment of words for chanted syllables, mirroring the theme of running out of explanation
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