VILLAGERS HAVE announced a return to Galway in December to play the Black Box Theatre, while their fourth studio album, The Art Of Pretending To Swim, will be released next month.
Villagers - essentially Dublin singer-songwriter Conor O’Brien - play the Black Box on Thursday December 13 at 7.30pm, while The Art Of Pretending To Swim, the highly anticipated follow-up to the award winning trio of Becoming A Jackal (2010 ), {Awayland} (2013 ), and Darling Arithmetic (2015 ), is released via Domino on September 21.
The new album, recorded in “in a tiny attic room, a cramped little hovel", is understood to be a fusion of the styles explored on O'Brien's earlier albums, while adding a new-found soulfulness, rhythmic nous, and a panoply of sonic detail, both analogue and digital. “With Darling Arithmetic,” he explains, “I’d wanted loads of space, and to slow everything down. It really worked, but I felt I’d taken that earnest whisper-in-your-ear approach as far as it could go. I wanted to experiment again, to learn again, to make something more groove-based and warmer; something you can dance to."
O'Brien notes that The Art Of Pretending To Swim is also the first album "I’ve gotten deeply into production and mixing...the sound and tones are so much more important than before". As a result, the album features samples from jazz, Dutch flautist Maaike Van Der Linde and Irish classical collective The Crash Ensemble.
Tickets for Villagers Black Box show are €26/24 and go on sale on Friday August 31 from 10am via www.roisindubh.net; the Ticket Desk at OMG@Zhivago, Shop Street; The Róisín Dubh' and the Town Hall Theatre (0901 - 569777, www.tht.ie ).
