Of Monsters and Men returned to the studio after a long, intentional pause. After the arena cycle that followed Beneath the Skin (2015) the five members of the band stepped back from constant touring and big-stage life. They spent years writing quietly, feeling the pressure and the fatigue of a global success born from My Head Is an Animal (2011). That retreat matters because the songs on FEVER DREAM were born out of a specific exhaustion and a deliberate wish to remake the rules the band had been following.

The gap between albums stretched into a redesign of process. In interviews around the release the band described changing the way they wrote and demoed songs. Nanna Bryndís Hilmarsdóttir and Ragnar Þórhallsson moved away from the rehearsal-room model and toward smaller, laptop-based sketches and experiments. The result is an album that trades some of the acoustic clutter of earlier records for sharper electronic edges. The band called this record a reorientation. It is a record made by people wary of repeating the same triumphs without asking what those triumphs had cost.

The title is a claim and a diagnosis. The phrase Fever Dream names the condition the band says drove the album: dislocation, adrenaline, a want for presence. The lead single "Alligator" arrived on 3 May 2019 as a jolt. The song announced that this was not simply another volume of the band’s established sound. The textures are bigger. The drums hit harder. The narrative voice is less fable and more confrontation. That single framed the record as both reclaiming power and abandoning comforts.

The cultural moment framed the choices. In 2018 and 2019 indie acts were folding electronics into big-chorus songwriting to reach larger stages and radio formats. Of Monsters and Men did not mimic trends. They folded those tools into their own language. They kept the twin-voice dynamic of Nanna and Ragnar while shifting the scaffolding around it. The move made the band sound like a group testing how to be brutal and tender at once. The result is an album that reads like a map of a band learning to speak in a new register.

The band entered the studio with a collaborator who would translate those instincts into sound. For production they worked with Rich Costey alongside self-producing as a band. Costey’s résumé with dense, expansive mixes mattered. The combination produced something that still remembers Icelandic landscapes but does not inhabit them the way the earlier records did. The record that emerged on 26 July 2019 is deliberate about what it keeps and what it discards.

They recorded largely in Iceland and finished mixes in Los Angeles. The band spent the songwriting and recording phase in their home country, developing demos and full-band takes in Reykjavik-area sessions. The final mixes and finishing touches were carried out with co-producer and mixer Rich Costey in his Los Angeles studio during the last days before release. The back-and-forth between Icelandic intimacy and LA polish shaped the record’s contrasts.

Production credits list the band alongside Rich Costey. The album is officially produced by Of Monsters and Men and Rich Costey. Engineering and technical roles on the release include Martin Cooke on engineering and Joe LaPorta on mastering. Those names are small but exact. They signal a team that aimed for clarity and impact rather than bedroom fuzz. Costey’s experience with bands who wanted both punch and sheen mattered to the album’s final tonality.

The instruments and textures are specific and deliberate. Guitar and synth trade places across songs. Brynjar Leifsson’s electric guitar moves from chiming arpeggios to aggressive, saturated cuts. Kristján Páll Kristjánsson’s bass anchors many tracks with synth-bass and punchy low end. Arnar Rósenkranz Hilmarsson’s drums are foregrounded. In places the group uses drum loops and programmed percussion to sharpen rhythm. Synth pads and atmospheric keys fill the midrange where earlier records once placed acoustic guitars and glockenspiel.

Recording technique favored immediacy over ornament. The band reported building many songs from small demos, then tracking together to keep a live center. Where earlier albums foregrounded folk accretions and woodwind flourishes, FEVER DREAM reduces ornament and increases the contrast between quiet verses and explosive choruses. That decision is obvious in the mixes. The vocals sit forward. The chorus moments are wide and reverberant. The quieter passages are more skeletal.

A few production anecdotes underline the album’s mood. The "Alligator" video, filmed in what the band described as a haunted hotel, doubled the record’s feverish imagery and gave a visual shorthand to the album’s themes. The "Wild Roses" video, shot in a swimming pool in Hafnarfjörður, used choreographed, unsettling movement to translate the record’s emotional unease into physical terms. Such choices show the band treating image and sound as a single project of atmosphere.

Alligator This record opens with a declaration. "Alligator" is pure, jagged propulsion. The drums arrive like a line drawn in ink. Nanna’s vocal cuts through the mix with an edge she has not always used. The chorus, where she sings "Wake me up / I'm fever dreaming," functions as both mantra and battleground. Sonically the song strips away folky instrumentation in favor of pounding drums, buzzing guitar, and synth stabs. It served as the album’s lead single on 3 May 2019 and became the record’s radio wedge. Its success on Adult Alternative and Rock Airplay charts gave the band a concrete hit that also doubled as a mission statement. In sequence it pushes the listener into the album’s less pastoral, more urgent territory.

Ahay The second track shifts tone without losing momentum. "Ahay" opens the record’s interior life. It trades arena drums for layered vocal textures and a pulsing low end. The song keeps a restless heart in the chest of the record. Lyrically it continues themes of yearning and the difficulty of staying present. Instrumentation is spare initially and then accumulates: subtle synth washes, guitar motifs that circle back like memory, and close-miked vocal harmonies that sound intimate even at high volume. As a placement it relaxes from the opener while making the emotional stakes clear.

Róróró This track is one of the record’s dreamier passages. "Róróró" uses repetitive melodic cells and echoing vocals to create a sense of drift. The production frames the band as if seen through glass. Here the synth and percussion patterns imply movement across open spaces rather than forward charge. Nanna and Ragnar trade lines in ways that make the song feel like two halves of a conversation that neither can finish. In the album narrative it deepens the mood of disorientation that the title promises.

Waiting For The Snow "Waiting For The Snow" is a weather image made musical. The arrangement places soft percussion and reverberant guitar under lyrical lines about delay and expectation. The song’s restraint is its argument. Where other tracks swell into choruses, this one holds tension in stillness. That choice spotlights the band’s control of dynamics and their willingness to let silence or near-silence say as much as a three-part chorus.

Vulture, Vulture The title announces a threat and the music keeps the threat close. "Vulture, Vulture" layers a mechanical rhythm with half-whispered vocal lines that acquire menace as the arrangement thickens. The band uses repetition here to produce claustrophobia rather than release. Guitars and synths create angular counterpoint. The song’s placement in the first half of the album helps sustain an unsettled feeling before the record lets up.

Wild Roses Released as the record’s second single on 12 July 2019, "Wild Roses" is the album’s balladic center. It begins delicately and then builds into a broad, cinematic outro. Lyrically it is about recovering from hurt and attempting to reassemble oneself. Nanna’s melody here is expansive and vulnerable. The production lets a pop pulse carry the track while still honoring the band’s love of big, layered choruses. The music video’s water-bound choreography and Scandi-horror sensibility made the song literal in image and amplified the song’s uneasy beauty.

Stuck In Gravity This track is one of the record’s most overt attempts to reconcile old and new vocabularies. "Stuck In Gravity" pairs an intimate verse—acoustic-tinged and voice-forward—with a chorus that leans into bigger synth chords and a driving beat. Thematically it speaks to the weight of expectation and the difficulty of escape. Instrumentally it balances bass synths with cleaner guitar tones. In the album’s arc it functions as a hinge song, joining the record’s more aggressive first half to its reflective second half.

Sleepwalker "Sleepwalker" pulls back and reintroduces the band’s gift for fragile melody. It calls up the earlier era’s sensitivity while still living in the new landscape of programmed percussion and electronic ambience. The vocal arrangement here finds Nanna in a more confessional register. The song reads like admission and remedy at once. As sequence the track gives listeners a breath and a moment of human-scale intimacy before the record’s final push.

Wars Framed as a single with an animated video released later in the year, "Wars" is about the collision of conscious and subconscious states. The band described the visuals as manifesting that interior battle. Musically it is rhythm-forward, with bouncing bass and percussion pushing the verses and a chorus that lets vocal harmonies bloom. The song’s pop sensibility is on full display. Taken in sequence near the album’s end, "Wars" functions as a confrontation that readies the listener for resolution.

Under A Dome This track closes the album’s major arc but not the record itself. "Under A Dome" gives the feeling of being enclosed by one’s own anxieties while trying to remember air. The instrumentation is measured. Reverb and synth textures create the sense of a small world. Vocally the band keeps phrases close, as if confiding. Placed here it reads like a penultimate clearing of emotional space.

Soothsayer The album’s final track is a quiet coda that asks how to speak of the future after the fever has passed. "Soothsayer" is less a prediction and more a meditation. The arrangement shrinks again. The song uses silence and a few carefully chosen harmonic gestures to let the album end on a note of fragile possibility rather than triumphant closure. It is a deliberate stop.

Overall the album flows like a controlled conversation that rises and falls. The band places the most decisive moments early, then lets the middle of the record live in textures and tension before offering resolution near the end. Sequencing intentionally moves from aggressive declaration to interior reckoning. The decisions to foreground drums and synths, to place intimate songs against big choruses, and to allow the lead single to operate as gateway rather than template make FEVER DREAM a cohesive statement. It is not a document of a single mood. It is a map of a band negotiating the space between exposure and armor.

The immediate response was mixed but visible and measurable. Critics and fans noticed the band’s stylistic pivot. Reviews praised songs like "Alligator" while some critics questioned the record’s heavier pop lean. The album nevertheless found commercial traction. FEVER DREAM debuted in the US Top 10, reaching No. 9 on the Billboard 200 and hitting No. 1 on the Billboard Top Rock Albums chart. The lead single "Alligator" became a radio success, topping Billboard’s Rock Airplay and Adult Alternative Songs charts.

The band toured in support through late 2019. Performances on television programs and festival stages pushed the singles into wider circulation. The band presented the record as a unitary visual and sonic project by releasing videos with consistent, dreamlike imagery. Later promotional efforts continued into 2020, but the global pandemic disrupted many plans that year, as it did across the industry.

Over time the album’s reputation settled into a specific place. For some listeners FEVER DREAM is the record where Of Monsters and Men shed certain folkloric accoutrements and tested a larger pop scale. For others it is the moment the band made music that aimed directly at radio and arena formats. Its influence is subtle and practical: the record showed a band with roots in narrative folk how to translate those instincts into denser, electronic arrangements without losing their vocal identity.

The legacy is not about awards so much as evolution. The record reinforced the band’s capacity to change course. It produced a top-charting single and a No. 1 on Top Rock Albums. It also set up the band’s later work and projects that revisited their beginnings on anniversary releases and acoustic reinterpretations. In that sense FEVER DREAM functions as a hinge in their catalog. It asks how a band keeps its core voice while altering the language in which it speaks.