Of Monsters and Men / FEVER DREAM / 2019
Wars
wistful and conflicted, tender but bruised
A breakup song that frames a part-time, unsustainable relationship as a battle neither partner can win or fully leave. The narrator admits to loving their partner only in fragments of time, confessing to their own carelessness while still clinging to the physical and emotional residue of the other person.
conditional love self-sabotage emotional attrition denial and forced levity intimacy as conflict
Who's speaking
A first-person narrator addresses a former or fading partner directly, admitting fault while still describing the pull toward them; the voice is self-aware but not fully reliable, since it keeps softening its own culpability with imagery of drowning and burning rather than plain admission.
What happens
The song opens with a direct, almost interrogative address about the loneliness of an ending, then widens into metaphors of sinking and burning that suggest mutual destruction. The chorus returns repeatedly to a confession of limited, weekend-only love, paired with self-indictment, before the bridge exposes the couple's strategy of laughing through pain instead of addressing it. The final repetitions pile the chorus lines on top of each other, suggesting the cycle repeats rather than resolves.
How it's built
Built on a traditional verse-chorus pattern but driven almost entirely by the chorus's accumulating repetition. The two verses are short and imagistic, functioning more as mood-setting than storytelling, while the chorus carries the emotional argument and is repeated with increasing layering (background vocal echoes) by the song's end, mimicking an argument looping without conclusion. The bridge is the only moment of direct dialogue-like reflection, briefly breaking the chorus's grip before it returns, reinforced rather than resolved.
Section by section
Opening verse
The song begins by addressing the listener's imagined loneliness, immediately establishing a tone of quiet interrogation rather than accusation. The image of the sun breaking apart suggests an ending already underway, something both parties sense but haven't voiced.
Pre-chorus/bridge into chorus
“burn together”
The shift to shared destruction reframes the breakup as not just one person's fault but a mutual unraveling, setting up the moral ambiguity the chorus will lean into.
Chorus
“careless and I'm wicked”
The chorus's core confession undercuts its own tenderness by admitting fault in nearly the same breath, making the declaration of love feel partial and conditional rather than reassuring.
Second verse
Images of sinking stones and an unknown riverbed suggest loss of control and fear of consequence, extending the water imagery from the first verse into something more ominous and inevitable.
Bridge
“like it's OK”
The couple's forced laughter becomes a kind of emotional performance, hinting that the relationship's real weight is being avoided rather than resolved, which mirrors the song's refusal to reach closure.
Final choruses
The layering of background vocal fragments over the main lines creates a sense of overlapping voices, as if memory and self-justification are colliding simultaneously; the song ends not in resolution but in repetition, implying the conflict continues past the final note.
Craft
- metaphor
- War stands in for the relationship's exhausting, cyclical conflict, turning emotional ambivalence into a sustained combat image rather than a one-off comparison.
- imagery of elements
- Fire, sun, and sinking water recur to suggest both passion and drowning, implying the relationship is as consuming as it is unsustainable.
- synecdoche
- Describing the partner as fragments left stuck on the narrator's body reduces the person to physical remnants, emphasizing how incomplete and residual the love has become.
- repetition/anaphora
- The looping chorus phrase about only loving on weekends functions like a confession repeated until it starts to sound like an excuse, deepening the song's irony.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats the song as a confession of a love that only functions in limited doses—intense but unsustainable, with the narrator fully aware of their own destructive tendencies yet unable or unwilling to change them. An alternative reading could see the 'war' as external circumstance (distance, timing, lifestyle) rather than personal failing, with the weekend framing suggesting practical constraints rather than emotional cowardice. The lyric supports both, though the explicit self-description as careless and wicked leans the song toward self-implication rather than external blame.
Context
FEVER DREAM (2019) marked a shift toward glossier, more synth-driven production for Of Monsters and Men compared to their earlier folk-rock sound, and 'Wars' fits that era's preoccupation with personal relationships and internal conflict rather than the mythic, folkloric imagery of their earlier work. I don't have confirmed biographical details tying this song to a specific real-life event.
Listen for
- the way background vocals double and fragment the chorus lines in the final repetitions, suggesting an internal argument
- the recurring water and fire imagery across both verses, which ties destruction to intimacy
- the contrast between the soft, melodic delivery and the harsh self-description in the chorus
- how the bridge's attempt at laughter interrupts the song's rhythm, signaling emotional avoidance
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
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