Nanna Bryndís Hilmarsdóttir doesn’t want to be your ambassador for no hope. But she did shoot her album cover on an Icelandic glacier, in a whiteout, on a closed road, in a car that had no business being there. “We want no hope,” she joked. “Let’s start from nothing.” Welcome to How to Start a Garden, the solo debut from the Of Monsters and Men frontwoman, where the garden is metaphorical and the forecast is foggy at best.
“I just had an urge to do this record this way,” Nanna says of her solo turn. “It wasn’t this big decision. It just really happened very naturally.” That’s not to say the album, a hushed, glacial slow-burn, came out of nowhere—she’s been writing solo material for years, even before Of Monsters and Men was a band. “This solo project has always been a part of me,” she says. “It’s new, but I’m kind of revisiting something too.”
She took her time. She told no one. “It was a big secret,” she admits. “I didn’t tell my friends. I just let a few of the guys in the band hear what I was working on.” Writing during the pandemic in her bedroom and in a remote cabin, she leaned into the silence. “I like slower starts. I like creeping in,” she says, somehow applying both to the record and its first single, “Godzilla.” Yes, the monster metaphors continue.
“Godzilla is trying to exist,” she says, “and we’re like, ‘You monster!’ But Godzilla isn’t even aware of us except for the fact that we’re trying to kill it.” The idea of misunderstood destruction resonated. “We’re so quick to label something as bad. But once you shift perspective, it changes everything.”
The album’s sound was built around these liminal moments—spaces, silences, and the occasional volcanic collaborator. She worked with Justin Vernon favorite Justin Kaufmann and National linchpin Aaron Dessner in Upstate New York. “I’m a massive National fan,” she says. “Just to be in that space and learn from Aaron—it was huge.” Dessner’s spectral touch is evident in the record’s subtle tectonic shifts, but Nanna stays grounded in her own quiet turbulence. “Crybaby,” the next single, is a self-directed eye-roll. “I was just kind of sick of myself,” she says. “The title is like, ‘Ugh, crybaby.’ You know?”
And if the record has a final trick up its woolen sleeve, it’s “Am I hearing it right? Icelandic?” Yes. At the end of the record, Nanna breaks into her native tongue. It was terrifying. “It’s so vulnerable,” she says. “I get more nervous playing a show in Iceland than anywhere else.” Yet the mantra at the album’s end, she says, came naturally. “There’s a landscape to the end of that song. A vastness. And reciting those words in Icelandic just made sense.”
Even if that vastness was literally captured on a glacier road trip that could’ve ended in a Fargo sequel. “The road service told us it was closed,” she shrugs. “But we needed the shot.”
So they got the shot. And you get the record: How to Start a Garden—a slow, strange bloom from one of Iceland’s most haunting voices, and possibly the only album this year where the first single is named after a monster and the last line is whispered in a blizzard.
Watch the interview above and then check out the video below.
