John Grant began thinking about The Art of The Lie in the Autumn of 2022. Earlier that year, John had been introduced to Ivor Guest, producer and composer at Grace Jones’ Southbank show, the finale of her Meltdown Festival. They began talking about two records Guest had worked on, ‘Hurricane’ for Jones, ‘Prohibition’ for Brigitte Fontaine. “Grace and Brigitte are two very big artists for me,” says Grant. “I love the albums he did for them. ‘Hurricane’ is an indispensable piece of Grace’s catalogue.” An idea was sparked. “I said, I really think you should do this next record with me. He said, I think you’re right.”

A year and a half later, the result is John Grant’s most opulent, cinematic, luxurious album yet: The Art of The Lie. As the title suggests, the lyrical ingenuity counterweighted under all this considered musical largesse is as dark as its production is epic and bold. Ivor Guest and his

cast-list of storied musicians have brought the drama, flecks of intrigue as beguiling as Laurie Anderson or The Art of Noise. John Grant has earthed it in deeply felt humanity and pitch-black realism. “The clothing that it’s dressed up in makes it more palatable,” he says. “It helps the bitter pill go down. Music and humour are how I’ve always dealt with the dark side of life. Come to think of it, it’s how I deal with the good side too.”

Grant likens the musical flavours of The Art of the Lie to the sumptuous Vangelis soundtrack for Bladerunner or the Carpenters if John Carpenter were also a member. “The first time I saw that movie, that opening scene, and heard that music, I was astounded we were being introduced to the evil empire of the future combined with the most beautiful sounds I had ever heard.” While undeniably a John Grant record, nestling humour into tragedy, bleeding anger into compassion, there is a musical ambition and nerve to ‘The Art of the Lie’ which offsets its most political and personal moments.

The hard juxtaposition of beauty and cruelty makes for compelling listening on Grant’s sixth album, a record that ties childhood trauma to hardened adult after-effects, twinning both to the political malaise of America 2024, a country being drawn to the precipice of its own destruction. “We were allowed to feel like we belonged for a couple of seconds,” says Grant. “Not anymore.”

‘The Art of the Lie’ is a considered title, taken from the song Meek AF, itself a lyrical inversion of the biblical edict that the meek shall inherit the earth. Against a lubricated groove, some

Zapp-esque talk box and a spidery keyboard figure, Grant sets out his understanding of the new ethics of America. “Trump’s book, ‘The Art of the Deal’, is now seen by MAGA disciples as just another book of the Bible and Trump himself as a messiah sent from heaven. Because, God wants you to be rich.”

“This album is in part about the lies people espouse and the brokenness it breeds and how we are warped and deformed by these lies”, he says. “For example, the Christian Nationalist movement has formed an alliance with White Supremacist groups and together they have taken over the Republican party and see LGBTQ+ people and non-whites as genetically and even mentally inferior and believe all undesirables must be forced either to convert to Christianity and adhere to the teachings of the Bible as interpreted by them or they must be removed in order that purity be restored to ‘their’ nation. They now believe Democracy is not the way to achieve these goals. Any sort of pretence of tolerance that may have seemed to develop over the past several decades has all but vanished. It feels like the U.S. in is free-fall mode.”

Another abiding theme for the record is parenthood. Three songs, Father (“one of the best I’ve ever written”), with its redolent echoes of the stab and haunt of Pale Green Ghosts, Mother and Son and the hymnal Daddy, which explodes from a mordant chrysalis verse to its colourful butterfly chorus, make up the spine of the record. “Father contains both the adult and the child. Daddy is from the perspective of the child. I’m talking about the way that I relate to men as I go out into the world, because of the confusion I was brought up in about what it means to be a man.”

This bleak confusion underpins a particularly emotional new chapter in the novelistic solo life of John Grant. The artist is building a world, with new episodes augmented by new textures. In this respect, the presence of Ivor Guest is almost like a typesetter’s art. How best to convey the sad overview that the meek will not just be denied the world, but will be made its optimum scapegoat?

“We could often only work for two weeks at a time, it was so intense,” says Grant, before recalling one episode in the studio. “Ivor assembled a team of incredible musicians. Dave Okumu [from The Invisible] is such an incredible guitar player. He came into the room when we were playing the demo of Father and just immediately started doing what you hear on the record. Robin Mullarkey played fretless bass and blew my mind, and the very talented Sebastian Rochford was on drum detail. There were a lot of moments of magic from everyone.”

Among its unsettling political charge, a record of sometimes spectral beauty, sometimes elegant funk, like opener All That School For Nothing and irresistible first single, It’s a Bitch, emerges. “Father is a pretty simple track, musically speaking,” he explains. “It’s not a complicated composition. But it still feels very rich and layered because we took our time with it. We had to. It couldn’t be done quickly. To me, it’s always about distilling things down to their essential components.

Grant had been thinking of records that had a profound effect on him while making The Art Of The Lie. “The first time I heard Time Its Time, the last song on The Colour Of Spring by Talk Talk; or The Night of the Swallow by Kate Bush, on The Dreaming; or some of Jane Siberry’s material on The Speckless Sky or anything by Cocteau Twins or Dead Can Dance; those were important moments for me in music. And of course there is a bit of the Devo spirit in everything I do in some way or another. There’s a lot of amazing humour in their music but they were also serious as a heart attack. I guess this is one of the important themes in my life; it’s about moments and being able to recognize them and be in them while they are happening in spite of whatever else is going on. It’s being in a taxi, the most normal situation in the world and seeing the grandeur, the sheer weight and majesty of a big city passing by, staring in awe. The absurdity of the world on the outside juxtaposed with the world taking place on the inside. That fascinates me, the ability to capture what it really feels like to be a human.”

That is the chink of light slipping through the greying clouds of a world depleting. Beauty exists. John Grant will allow himself to see it. There is a bottle of salt he keeps in his home in Iceland, a gift from a fan, with a ribbon attached at the top. “There’s a little note on the top of it,” he recalls. “It says ‘each grain of salt contained herein represents a time that your songs have saved my life.’ That was truly a precious gift and it helps to look at that when things get very dark.”

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Conor O’Brien may sport a fetching beard these days but the third album he’s recorded as Villagers finds the Dubliner shaving his music right back to the bone. By comparison, his 2010 debut album Becoming A Jackal and especially its 2013 successor [Awayland] – both hugely acclaimed and nominated for Britain’s Mercury Prize, while the latter won Ireland’s equivalent Choice Prize – were more detailed, multi-faceted affairs, so Darling Arithmetic is a brave and committed new step forward, eschewing the easier route. O’Brien plays every instrument on these exquisite, melodic songs in a beautifully sparse, spacious, intimate, acoustic-leaning fashion. He also recorded and mixed the album at his home, revealing a single-minded artist at the peak of his already considerable song-writing powers.
 
“[Awayland] in particular, I was experimenting with lots of stuff, which I really enjoyed,” O’Brien recalls. “But when I started this album, I wanted to get on one line, with the same feeling from start to finish, that I was emotionally satisfied with. Right before I started writing the songs, I watched Vittorio De Sica’s film Bicycle Thieves, which has this one clear vision, so beautifully executed and so simple. I even thought of giving each song its own love adjective, like ‘Unrequited’ or ‘Unconditional’. I’d been a bit disappointed in myself for hiding behind metaphors.”
 
Darling Arithmetic was recorded by O’Brien in the loft of a converted farmhouse that he shares in the coastal town of Malahide to the north of Dublin. Backing up his supple and emoting vocal and guitar is the subtlest palate of instrumentation – piano, Mellotron (which accounts for the album’s occasional horn and cello tones) and brushes. “I wanted to play delicately and respond to the emotion of each song,” he explains.
 
Lyrically, O’Brien has taken the same trajectory, revealing more of himself than ever before. Darling Arithmetic is a record entirely about love and relationships, done not in a long-winded, conceptual narrative manner but a concise statement of nine songs and 37 minutes. The lyrics encompass the various shades of feeling: desire, obsession, lust, loneliness and confusion, and deeper into philosophical and existential territory, across a cast of lovers, friends, family and even strangers.
 
On Darling Arithmetic, O’Brien looks deep into his own heart and motives. The opening ‘Courage’ – also the album’s lead single – concerns the most important kind of love – for yourself: “It took a little time to get where I wanted / It took a little time to get free / It took a little time to be honest / It took a little time to be me.”
 
There were live appearances in 2014 at the Nick Drake tribute at London’s Rough Trade shop, and In Dreams: David Lynch Revisited at London’s Barbican, as well as playing the Ceiliúradh (Celebration) arts event at London’s Royal Albert Hall in April 2014 (including a duet with Elvis Costello on ‘Shipbuilding’), but O’Brien says a fourth external factor shaping his new record was joining John Grant – the king of the bare-naked confessional – on stage in 2013 to assist in performing the American’s mighty ‘Glacier’ at the annual Other Voices concert in 2013 (and again in 2014 at Dublin’s Olympia, where Sinéad O’Connor also joined this most sublime of vocal casts).
 
O’Brien’s own album came together as naked arrangements inspired by naked lyrics, with the songs gelling into one distinct and harmonious form. A soulful ‘Hot Scary Summer’ rakes over the break-up of a love affair blighted by “all the pretty young homophobes looking out for a fight”. “No One To Blame’ is the album’s ‘unrequited’ song, addressing “those objects of affection that you’ll never have, and letting it affect your self-esteem. But I wanted a romantic tinge too, to almost give credence to those negative feelings. So for anyone feeling this right now, I have a song for you, a song that I wish I’d had when I was in that place.”
 
In ‘Little Bigot’, O’Brien declares love for the very person that won’t accept him, suggesting that they “throw that hatred on the fire.” The same feeling – that love is the most enduring of human traits – also inspires the album’s particularly becalmed finale ‘So Naïve’, as O’Brien realises that ”we actually don’t know anything”: “I’m a little sad ‘most every day ‘til you call my name or make me stay / That’s when I believe that I’m part of something bigger / I’m so naive but I guess I’ve got it figured out.”
 
Darling Arithmetic hasn’t totally done away with metaphor. The title track addresses the dearly departed (“If ours was a dream / A phantom, a sacred scheme / Then how did it end so quick?”). The title derived from the notion that, “Arithmetic is the basis of all mathematics, and ‘darling’ is a term of endearment, so it comes from that feeling of your loved ones being the basis of everything.”
 
In ‘The Soul Serene’ – which returns to the theme of self-acceptance and respect – O’Brien says he “wanted to write a meditation song… I had an idea of blankness as I was writing it.” He sings of “chameleon dreams” to signify how “your mind can get mixed-up when there’s too much going on in there, but you can use that to strengthen the imagination and your idea of the possibilities of where to take your life.”
 
Now three albums in, Villagers is the front for playfulness and seriousness, mystery and revelation, an open-ended and flexible beast that can be anything its creator wants it to be. By going back to the root of song-writing, O’Brien has reinvented himself. As he said when releasing his first album, “I don’t want Villagers to be the finished product, but to be constantly changing, moving and growing. I’m really proud of this album but I feel like I’ve only just started getting somewhere, and I can hear so much more.”