Sunday night Of Monsters And Men’s latest tour rolled into Hollywood at the Palladium for a 2-night stand, which ended up being a 1-night stand instead, due to scheduling issues of some sort. The Icelandic group, who burst onto the scene in 2011 with their debut album My Head Is An Animal and massive worldwide hit “Little Talks”, drew a very large crowd. If it wasn’t sold out it must’ve been close.

Touring in support of their latest, and third, album Fever Dream, the show featured the intertwined vocals of Nanna Bryndís Hilmarsdóttir and Raggi Þórhallsson flowing with the folk rock sound they’ve perfected, at times delicate and touching, at times somehow absolutely massive AND heart warming.. The band’s gift for ear-worm melodies was evident early in the show with newish single “Alligator”, the first song on the latest release, as well as “Empire” from 2015’s Beneath The Skin, and the crowd really went wild for the second-biggest hit single from their debut, “Mountain Sound”.

Mid-show highlight, Raggi demanded the crowd dance along to disco-tinged “Wars” which contrasts a fun pop sound with some heavy relationship-problem lyrics. Everyone obliged. It was fun.

The later parts of the show ebbed and flowed from the introspective “Crystals” to the epic build of “Lakehouse” to the explosion crazy energy everyone in the crowd freak out about “Little Talks”. Of Monsters and Men have a lot of great songs, but that’s gotta be the big one every time they play live. By now it’s so ingrained in all of our conscience from endless sync placements over the years that sometimes you forget a band actually wrote and recorded it and plays it live and it still sounds great! It was fun to hear it live. Putting the massivest song near the end, but not ending with it, seems like the right call.

A few more song and an encore later everyone departed with huge smiles, a skip in their step, and at least 10 or 11 more melodies jammed in their brain for an eternity. I one-hundred percent would recommend checking them out.

Words and photos by Tim Aarons