The indie-folk band, Villagers will be hitting the road this October in support of their fifth studio album ‘The Art of Pretending to Swim’, which is scheduled for release on the 21st of September 2018 through Domino Records. This comes after it was announced that the band would be one of the headliners for Metropolis Festival on 27th October in Dublin’s RDS. The announcement of the additional Irish dates will see the band heading to Dublin, Belfast, Limerick, Galway and Kilkenny.
Irishman Conor J. O’Brien, better known by his recording name Villagers, announced on Twitter that not only will they be coming to Dublin in October, but they have added additional stops in Belfast, Limerick, Galway, and Kilkenny to their ‘The Art of Pretending to Swim’ Tour. The UK leg of the tour begins on the 17th of October in Nottingham, and concludes on the 20th of October in Bristol, before continuing the European leg of the tour in Brussels on the 1st of November. The band will then return to Ireland on the 10th of December in Belfast before concluding their tour on 14th of December in Kilkenny.
“I find making music quite a comfortable experience, but you’ve just gotta let it happen. With this album, it was slightly reactionary, given that I’d toured (2015 LP) ‘Darling Arithmetic’ and brought out another album (‘Where Have You Been All My Life?’) during that touring, and both of those albums were quite sparse and confessional, and I think I’d really done that to death. So, the beginning of this one was a reaction to that, and trying to get back to enjoying arranging things, and making things as exciting as possible in a textural way, using a different part of my brain and testing myself again,” says Conor, speaking about the album ‘The Art of Pretending to Swim’.
The band have already released singles ‘Trick of the Light’ and ‘Fool’, which saw the release of the new video for ‘Fool’ on the 20th of August 2018, from their upcoming album. Speaking about the track ‘Fool’, Conor said: “Fool is a weird one because it came from a much more sprawling set of notes. I have this very strong memory of just sitting on the floor with about ten pages of notes in front of me, and they all had varyingly successful little diatribes about how technology is connected to our ideas of faith in life.
“I thought it was going to be this twelve-minute sprawling folk piece. I had all these visions for it to be this epic masterpiece, and by the end of the week, it turned into this really concise pop song, which was really surprising to me. It’s a romantic battle cry; a scream in the middle of a technology-centred dystopia, trying to find some sort of romance while someone in front of you is just staring at their phone.
UK Tour Dates:
17/10/2018 – Nottingham Rescue Rooms – Nottingham
18/10 – Glasgow Art School – Glasgow
19/10 – Gorilla – Manchester
21/10 – Wardrobe – Leeds
22/10 – Oxford Academy 2 – Oxford
23/10 – Hackney Arts Centre – London
25/10 – Liverpool Arts Club – Liverpool
27/10 – Metropolis Festival – Dublin
20/10 – Trinity – Bristol
Irish Tour Dates:
10/12/2018 – The Empire Music Hall – Belfast
12/12 – Dolans – Limerick
13/12 – Black Box – Galway
14/12 – The Set Theatre – Kilkenny
