Groove Tube with Cian O’Connell

Conor O’Brien has been the creative force behind Villagers for fifteen years and six albums of dulcet, fluid indie-folk.  The Dublin singer/songwriter and producer plays Leisureland this Thursday night on the final date of his That Golden Time tour – so named after his latest record, which arrived in May.

O’Brien describes it as a sort of Villagers greatest hits tour, featuring explorations of his back catalogue inspired by a book of lyrics and artwork he released in the last couple of months.

“I can’t wait actually,” he says ahead of the gig. “We’ve never played Leisureland so that’ll be nice. It’s always good to try a new room. It’s always a really buzzy vibe in Galway so it’s a nice way to end it.

“I’ve been going back through the old songs and through the lyric book. Crafting a bit of a journey in the show via various songs from the last fifteen years. It’s a little bit more of a retrospective tour which is really fun actually. We’ve been able to forge a different kind of show with a much wider remit of songs.

“Rediscovering them and rearranging them really. There’s a lot of new versions of the songs on this tour and they’re also changing night by night. We’ve been keeping it very loose which I think is the way I want to go from now on.”

That Golden Time is a typically considered project. Its predecessor, 2021’s Fever Dreams, had stretched Villagers’ capacity for noise and intensity, full of friction and experiments in heavier music.

This LP affords its tracks more space. O’Brien does not enter a period of writing with any preconceived notions of an overarching theme, but he tends to uncover his own thoughts as they spill out of him in a series of songs. On this occasion, he found himself compelled to write about the internet age.

“I just find it really difficult to ignore how insane the changes have been and how fast they’ve been in the past fifteen years,” he says.

“Maybe it’s just getting older and me being a grumpy, middle-aged man but it’s blowing my mind how technology and social media and all that stuff has changed the way we interact with each other. Even the way we dream or how we visualise things and how we use language. How we deal with the messy, complicated thing that is life and existence.

Pictured: Villagers’ Conor O’Brien…Leisureland gig concludes Golden Time tour.