Bleep

Press Release

Escapism is a very necessary pursuit right now and Conor O’Brien follows it to mesmerising effect on Villagers’ fifth studio album. ‘Fever Dreams’ works like all the best records - it becomes a mode of transport; it picks you up from where you are and sets you down elsewhere. “I had an urge to write something that was as generous to the listener as it was to myself,” he says. “Sometimes the most delirious states can produce the most ecstatic, euphoric and escapist dreams.”These are songs with the strange, melted shapes and the magical ambivalence of dreams. On ‘Fever Dreams’, there is a sense of a deepening mastery and an expanding reach. There is a fullness, a sense of earned wholeness. Its sound is big and rich. The intent of the songs is both mysterious and as clear as a bell. There is a sense of ease to the songwriting, it feels very natural - it’s as if these songs were out there all the while, they just needed to be found and carefully picked up. Written over the course of two years, the main bodies of the songs were recorded in a series of full-band studio sessions in late 2019 and early 2020. Over the course of the long, slow pandemic days, O’Brien refined them in his tiny home studio in Dublin, and the album was then mixed by David Wrench (Frank Ocean, The xx, FKA Twigs)