mary in the junkyard are creating their own talismans

The capital’s grassroots venues became the testing ground for their experimental “angry weepy chaos rock”, and the South London trio moved through them with conviction, gigging relentlessly before they’d even started releasing music. They eventually made their debut in 2024 with their EP this old house, committing the surreal storytelling of their live show to four recorded tracks. And with that, they kept moving with propulsive momentum, touring across the United Kingdom and Europe, playing KEXP sessions, and embarking on a three-month stint supporting Wet Leg across North America. 

But in the midst of all of that, mary in the junkyard were already gearing up for their next chapter. Despite maintaining a cramped schedule with touring and simply living day-to-day life, they crammed in hours wherever they could find them to write and record in their Lewisham practice studio. Over time, these sessions would lead to the construction of their debut full-length album: Role Model Hermit.

Role Model Hermit builds on the myth-oriented narrative style of this old house, which captures the experience of being away from the memories that are held in the walls of a place, centring around feelings of homesickness with a sonic heaviness that pooled elements of grunge and post-punk. But the EP came from a different place, existing as a snapshot from the band’s early timeline. “It feels like a really long time ago, the EP,” Freeman-Taylor recalls. “We were discovering what it was to be a band and play shows and stuff. A lot of those songs happened just from our live shows; they were born from just playing gigs.”

Because the songs on the EP were developed in gig spaces, the band, understandably, went all in when it came time to record. this old house was captured all in one room, chaotic and bleed-heavy. “I was using the £50 microphone that I found on Amazon in the same room with full bleed,” Freeman-Taylor tells me. “I was like, ‘Hell yeah, we’re gonna record it with full bleed, it’s going to be like a kitchen sink, fully in-the-room sound.’ But through a nightmare mixing process, I learned that it’s better to record on better microphones with a bit more isolation.” 

With that in mind, the band traded that earlier chaos for something more deliberate, mindful to let the songs breathe. “That all-in-one-room, small-space sound works well for the first EP, but the album has a lot more space,” Addison adds. At first it was a lot of doing lots of different things with the structure, lots of changes. Now we focus more on sound and texture – shades of light and dark.”

This approach is also evident in the album’s lyrical content. Role Model Hermit does not emphasise a particular feeling. Rather, the band utilises the eleven tracks to build an expansive world of fables, folk tales, and veiled personal anecdotes as Freeman-Taylor challenges herself to balance emotional storytelling with honesty and compassion. 

Getting to this point, however, was a big deal for mary in the junkyard, and they treated it as such. They worked hard for it, and acknowledged that they would need ample space to prepare before undertaking the task of making a full body of work. 

If you ask mary in the junkyard what that preparation entails, what keeps the three of them tethered to each other and to the work, their answer is more metaphysical as opposed to a clear-cut set of steps, another page in the immersive book of mary in junkyard lore. For a moment, I’m given access into the beating heart of the trio – with permission to divulge. “The orb is both a physical thing – well, it can be in physical form – but it also is an energy,” Freeman-Taylor explains, with Barbaglia and Addison chiming in in agreement. “It’s like when you’re in flow, and when you also feel safe and warm. It’s the connection and energy between us that we’ve really cultivated over years of playing together.” 

As a driving force for mary in the junkyard, the orb is omnipresent. In their rehearsal room, there’s a lamp that they describe as orb-like, and they turn it on when they need it. Album opener “Mantra III” was written when the orb was on. The trio have attempted to incorporate it in photo shoots, and they regard it as an important symbol. The original orb, a glass sphere, was unfortunately broken, but this has given way for the creation of a new one with greater intention. Freeman-Taylor proudly shows me a photo of the handmade structure, which is also being made to echo the themes of the album it will come to represent. 

It was during the band’s first, entirely unplanned trip to America in 2024 that the shape of the Role Model Hermit really started to come together. The orb, and what it stands for, is also a useful framework for understanding how. Much of the album was written between shows and across continents, which required a sustained energy and sense of trust that could persist early on, regardless of location. So when they arrived in New York with no itinerary and no accommodation, there was an underlying sense that things would fall into place.

With no set itinerary, the band opted to do what they knew best: performing. They caught the attention of a local artist named Todd, who offered them a place to crash, lent them a room to write in, and invited them to perform a private concert for his partner and a handful of friends within the city’s art scene. Todd's partner turned out to be artist and performer Marina Abramović. A guest at the performance was so struck by the band that they gave the trio an effects pedal that would go on to shape two of Role Model Hermit’s most pivotal tracks, “Crash Landing” and “Mouse”. It’s an encounter that comes across as fated, and perhaps informed the band’s desire to zoom in on the details of their most spontaneous, fantastical real-life experiences, while also willing themselves to toe the line of fact and fiction.

But mary in the junkyard don’t quite identify fact and fiction as distinct categories. “I don’t know how different they really are,” Barbaglia muses when I raise the album’s balance of the two. “It’s all truth.”

“A lot of the songs are just metaphors,” Freeman-Taylor continues. “Every single song is describing something, whether that’s quite literal or a metaphor. Our job is to provide the sounds while we tell the story.”

Addison adds: “It doesn’t matter so much whether it’s true or false. It’s about the story and the feelings that are universal. Whether it’s a real story or a fake one, it’s still love and sadness – those things are always there.”

This is particularly evident on “Mouse”, which very nearly lent the album its title. The song grew out of a period in which Freeman-Taylor was having what she describes as genuine past-life memories, explaining: “I started having really strong memories of a past life. I could not stop eating fish, I couldn’t stop thinking about the ocean, and boats. Those are all things a seafaring man would have done two hundred years ago. At the same time, I had this feeling of something small and warm in my hands. It was a mouse, in my pocket. I was also thinking a lot about how you could have known everyone around you before in many different forms. I was obsessed with that. ‘Mouse’ is trying to tell that story. I found the person that used to be the mouse, and it’s addressed to them.” 

At that time, she was also attending folk sessions, sitting in circles, learning traditional songs, and that texture coloured the writing, while also allowing her to observe in-the-room connection that can exist with greater weightlessness.

“Thou Shalt Sprout” worked in the reverse. It began as a folk fable about a father risking his own limbs to feed his family, drawn to the shape of the music first and the words second. “When I write the lyrics it’s usually because of the way the music sounds,” Freeman-Taylor reveals. “The music is already telling some kind of story. With ‘Thou Shalt Sprout’ the lyrics came really fast. It’s quite a convoluted story, but it came really naturally because of the way the music felt.” And it was only after recording it that Freeman-Taylor recognised the song as a reflection of watching her father maintain a job that kept him absent from home more than any of them would have liked. Ultimately, working through fiction allowed her to access a truth that she hadn’t yet consciously reached.

The recording process took place with a structure that allowed those moments to surface freely. The band spent two weeks at a studio in Greenwich called Unwound in January. It was bleak and dark, owing to the season, but they still wrote every day. Before that, it was the Lewisham rehearsal room, which overflowed with props that they accumulated from videos and shoots. “It’s full of our things, and it feels like a really cozy space,” the band acknowledges. Both places, and the studio where they recorded with producer Oli Bayston, existed as a closed world belonging to them. “There was no separate control room,” they note of the recording studio. “It’s like one big, open room, so that relationship feels really collaborative, because we’re all in the same space at the same time.” Bayston trusted their instincts and only pushed back when he thought a song needed to stay in a specific vibe for longer, but never overstepped.

The foundation of every track is still a live take: all three of them in a room, playing together. “When we’re recording, you’ll know if that was the take. It’s just a unanimous decision. It’s not even a decision. It’s just: that’s true.” Getting to that moment, they agree, is the actual work. “The difficult thing about recording isn’t playing, because it doesn’t matter if you make mistakes. It’s about cultivating a space where we can all be in flow. That’s the hardest thing about being in a band.”

The album’s title carries the same tension as its songs, and indicates the conditions required for them to express themselves effectively. “The hermit bit of it really makes sense with the way it sounds,” Addison says. “Lots of caves, safe spaces. It’s a headphone album.” The role model is the other half of it: “In order for us to have made this record, it required so much time of us individually spending time figuring out how we wanted to express music, and then coming together and making this thing that everyone can see,” Barbaglia explains. “It’s the amount of care it takes, in a hermit stage, to create something that could be a role model for someone else.”

“We’re being hermits to make the record, and we’re being role models by standing on the stage and playing,” Freeman-Taylor concludes. “Both are equally important.” 

Through exploring that dichotomy, each member was more attuned to what needed to be brought to the songs. On bass, Barbaglia allowed herself to be grounded and minimal, aiming to move people simply with vibrations and subtle places. On strings, she wanted to spark a different response by playing with a sense of wildness and freedom. Addison paces himself to create varying moments of intensity, mindful of the build-ups that balance opposing feelings of happiness and sadness. Both musicians are attentive to the way their craft coexists with the varied emotionality of Freeman-Taylor’s varied songwriting, allowing themselves to be led by feeling without being too precious about the outcomes. 

But what comes next, they say, pivots somewhere different. They’re already thinking about the songs for their next project, which they describe as “less deep and sad and wintery than this – less cocoon. It’s more guitar.” There are glints of mischief and play in the songs on Role Model Hermit, which they regard as “trying to be punk”, hinting at expansive potential for the music to come from mary in the junkyard. 

But for now, they don’t seem particularly worried about defining what that looks like. As time goes on, and their reach grows, their lives are changing. In a short period of time, being part of mary in the junkyard has become a full-time gig for the trio. But as their circumstances change, one thing that remains consistent is the level of connectedness that allows them to continue doing what they love. 

“We have a lot of similarities to each other, but we have quite different brains. It’s the combination of those,” Addison says. “I think we’re all good at different things, but also just all really love each other. We all push each other a bit in interesting and good ways.”

“It is a gift and a blessing to share values and ideas with your friends,” Freeman-Taylor affirms. “We’re so mutually inspired by the same thing, so much that we don’t even have to communicate it to each other. It’s just inside of us, and we see each other in what we do.”

Freeman-Taylor sweetly acknowledges their connection as a “golden goose”, a machine that will always generate ideas. “We’ve submitted ourselves to this lifestyle,” they agree, “And it just really works. It’s the best thing ever to be in a band.”