Villagers

The Stool Pigeon, 2013

Conor J. O’Brien is cackling like a madman, forcing a laugh for a photoshoot and sounding more maniacal with every click of the camera. The photographer has been saying “just one more shot” for 15 minutes, having dressed Villagers’ diminutive frontman in various outfits and wrapped him in silver foil. But as the laugher sputters out with a sigh and a weary expletive, O’Brien’s patience begins to strain. “It’s a really sad album, you know,” he says, politely hinting that portraying him as a chortling Christmas decoration might not be appropriate.

Not so long ago, O’Brien tried to ditch the melancholy in his music by pursuing a new direction: an instrumental electronic album inspired by throbbing Krautrock. It was a reaction, of sorts, to the whirlwind that began with 2010’s Becoming A Jackal.

Villagers’ debut of cathartic hymnals had proved such a success — an Ivor Novello award, a Mercury nomination, a number one album at home in Ireland — that the subsequent demand for live performances left O’Brien little time to assess what life was throwing at him. His sister died the week of the album’s release, and after three years of touring the same material, it started to feel like he was lying to people on stage.

“I didn’t like aspects of the music I’d been singing every night: the more confessional, first-person songs. Trying to make the audience feel how I felt seemed manipulative with certain songs, so I didn’t want to do that again.”

Determined to create something more uplifting and imaginative, O’Brien sat down with a guitar and some paper… but nothing came. “I’d write two words and I’d already imagine what the critics would say, which was annoying. I had to get out of that mindset and it took a while to strip all that away.”

Hoping to spark some inspiration, he flung himself into the unknown. He bought a synthesiser, a sampler and a drum machine. He learned how to finger-pick. He began assimilating funk and techno. Only then did songs start presenting themselves, opening up the possibility of a career-changing path. He laughs now at the idea of handing his label Domino a thumping one-track instrumental album, but it wasn’t to be. “Slowly, the lyrics fucked it all up.”

There were grey hairs and blow-ups along the way but the end-result reveals a subtle growth. {Awayland}, which is out out next week, is meatier than its fragile-sounding predecessor, carefully resisting overexertion in favour of a more textured and adventurous sound. Steering it all is O’Brien’s single-minded focus, one that has him reading his own press, scrutinising the faces of his audience at shows and recording album-quality demos with every band member’s parts clearly mapped out for them.

{Awayland} took five weeks of recording at a live-in studio so rural that he couldn’t leave unless someone had a car. But once the album was nailed and the promo copies were all sent out, O’Brien felt something wasn’t right, insisting the label allow him to edit and re-master the whole thing. Maintaining that level of detail guarantees little, though, when every song feels like a compromise that never quite captures what’s in his head.

Dressed in a dark check shirt and black skinny jeans upturned at the ankles, the 29-year-old is leaning forward in the armchair of a faux-seventies parlour bar in Dublin, a glass of hot whiskey in his hands. A creeping shadow of stubble betrays his baby-faced image, his self-assurance in contrast with the vulnerable, wide-eyed songwriter people often take him for. The empty room around him is crammed with tatty brown sofas and orange rugs, its fireplace struggling to keep some dying embers alight.

O’Brien grew up 20 minutes south of here in the port town of Dun Laoghaire, a reluctantly acknowledged source of the nautical imagery streaming through his songs: the broken boats, waves and lighthouses captured in melodies so hushed they’re almost spoken. It was there, at the age of 12, that O’Brien moved from a school where he was one of the wealthiest kids to one where he was among the poorest — a transition that prompted a full immersion in music.

“It kind of hit me to suddenly be in a room full of all these spoiled little rich brats running around being dickheads,” he says, explaining that this was during the boom of Ireland’s Celtic Tiger era. “I pretty much learned not to bother talking to anyone from the ages of 12 to 18 because I was so depressed by most of the people around me. There was no worth in anything for them. They were just given everything. I felt really… alien from that. So I didn’t really come out. I just locked myself away and wrote songs.”

Years later, in the early days of Villagers, Radiohead guitarist Ed O’Brien approached the band to offer some encouragement. He advised them to work until they couldn’t physically work anymore, then just keep working. Talent can always die, he added, unless it’s kept alive with constant effort.

O’Brien knew that already, he says with a laugh, though he believes sticking to that principle has made him impervious to all criticism except his own. Lest the mistakes of the last album be repeated, he has strengthened his quality control to the point where he’ll sacrifice “something that works beautifully on headphones but, once you have to physically play it every night, will make you to want to kill yourself”.

If the new songs he’s settled on can’t get the band pumped up with a feverish sweat over the next year or so of touring, another attempt at reinvention may be called for. But rather than dread another whirlwind, O’Brien is confident the challenge will prove worthwhile.

“I’m not going to give a Bono speech,” he says. “I just want to bring my songs to as many cultures and people as possible and see if they still mean anything in those places. I think that’s the real test.”