The best song on Conor O’Brien’s debut album as Villagers, “Becoming a Jackal,” is about a bus breaking down. Not in any dramatic fashion, just a typical sputtering out that leaves the Dubliner among a few dozen passengers stranded on an Irish roadside. That crew makes up the cast of "Twenty-Seven Strangers," a quiet acoustic rumination on loneliness, death and the gnawing need for love.

“I don’t drive at home, so I’m always taking buses, and I really wanted to write a song about this mundane thing and see where it went,” O’Brien said. “I want my songs to discuss things that aren’t really said between people, and when you put that in an everyday setting, it shows that everyone has a universe inside their head.”

The rest of the world of Villagers, which play the Music Box tonight, is a bit more intense. The album’s rooted in simple tools -– O’Brien’s vibrato-stricken vocals and sprawling, lyric-centric songwriting; loosely wound guitar strums and homespun orchestral complements. But it adds up to one of the most interesting and singular visions for the genre since, well, the last inky-haired Conor O. of Irish lineage to self-lacerate over dark-eyed indie folk.