Crystals

"Crystals" is Of Monsters and Men trading the campfire folk of their debut for something colder and more architectural. It builds on a driving, propulsive drum pattern and a low synth throb, with guitars processed into shimmer rather than strum — the Icelandic band moving from acoustic warmth toward the glacial spaciousness of their own landscape. Nanna Bryndís Hilmarsdóttir carries the lead almost alone here, a shift from the male-female trading of "Little Talks," and her voice has a clear, slightly brittle purity that cracks open on the chorus when the arrangement floods upward. The lyric works through imagery rather than statement: covering skin, breaking through a surface, a self that is buried and trying to emerge — the crystals functioning as something both beautiful and hard, a shell that protects and imprisons at once. *Beneath the Skin* is an album about interiority and fear, and this is its most cathartic release valve. The emotional arc is compression then flight. It suits a night drive through open country, or headphones on a walk in cold air when you need something that feels like it is lifting you slightly off the ground.