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May 08, 2024 By Mark Redfern Photography by Andrew Whitton

Villagers (aka Irish musician Conor O’Brien) is releasing a new album, That Golden Time, this Friday via Domino. Now he has shared the album’s latest single, “I Want What I Don’t Need,” via a lyric video for it. Watch it below.

O’Brien had this to say about the song in a press release: “It’s a little tragicomedy about the concept of free will, intellectual humility and the commodification of sacred things. As with all the songs from the album, a yearning for transcendence at the dawn of the internet age is at its core. We’re constantly being bombarded by ideas, images and products telling us that our internal directives are insufficient; that we need external support or validation in order to become whole beings. The song pokes fun at this: ‘And I’ll wed myself to my beliefs / And they’ll harden like my arteries / And I’ll take myself so seriously / And I’ll want what I don’t need.’”

That Golden Time is the band’s sixth album and follows 2021’s Fever Dreams and 2018’s The Art of Pretending to Swim.

Previously O’Brien shared the album’s title track and “You Lucky One.”

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