Heartworms on the personal memories and military history that inform her debut album 'Glutton For Punishment' • Interview • DIY Magazine

A graveyard, Jojo Orme observes, is the opposite of a hospital: one is bustling, noisy, a place where life is brought into the world; the other is peaceful - where life ends, and we rest. We’re meandering around West Norwood Cemetery after today’s shoot, the low winter sun making the grey headstones glow, as we look for any bearing our names. Far from being bleak, there’s something inherently calming about the setting, the graves’ inscriptions a poignant testament to the significance of memory not just in death, but in life too.

Jojo, as it happens, is no stranger to the subject. “I’m a very sentimental person,” she explains later, as we bundle into a nearby cafe to warm up. She asks if it’s OK to have some quotes to hand, just in case, before placing a pair of beautifully bound notebooks - and a dog-eared copy of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde - on the table between us. “I find meaning behind anything that has a memory connected to it, or an emotion connected to it that provokes a memory. I’m obsessed with my youth and my past.”

For someone who first established their artistic identity via Glengarry stagewear and a deep love of Spitfires (she even has a tattoo of the aircraft), a preoccupation with history is hardly surprising. Indeed, when the debut project from Heartworms - Jojo’s onstage moniker and pseudo alter ego - arrived in 2023, it was received as a bugle call unlike almost anything else around, and quickly amassed troops of fascinated fans. Now, though, she’s readying for the arrival of her debut album proper; a wide-reaching, deep-diving, remarkable exploration of collective remembrance and personal ghosts.

“Heartworms was this world that I could create with my own hands, and no one could touch it.”

Back in June last year, Jojo put out ‘Jacked’ - the very first track to be shared from ‘Glutton For Punishment’. In its cinematic accompanying video (directed by her closest collaborator, Gilbert Trejo), she’s presented as a prisoner; a hostage who, when under interrogation, proclaims: “As long as I can remember, I’ve been alone. At first there were people… I was alone. Lonely. And then I saw that the loneliness was them. And so I ran. And everywhere that I looked they were there, consumed by my loneliness.”

As textual prefaces go, it’s a pretty powerful one. She shrugs and gives a small smile. “Ever since I was a child, I’ve had so many people around me, but I couldn’t communicate with them, and I always ended up alone. I was always blamed for things; even at school, people used to run away from me. I couldn’t find meaning or understanding through people, and it made me feel more lonely trying to understand them or communicate [with them].”

Heartworms, she explains, was born out of this isolation - part self-extension, part personality unto itself - it represented a stronger, darker force. “When I became Heartworms, it was such an escape for me because I wasn’t enjoying who I was at the time, so it was a confidence boost. It was this world that I could create with my own hands, and no one could touch it.” Older, wiser, and truly stepping into “who [she] is as Josephine”, Jojo now conceptualises her relationship with Heartworms as something less aspirational, and more peer-like. “I can see her growing and becoming something else,” she nods, “and I’m holding her hand.” There are, we suggest, distinct echoes of Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde, nodding to the Gothic novella. “I don’t know what the ending is yet,” she laughs, but I do like the idea: the whole swapping of personalities, and how Heartworms is darker; how sometimes I want to run away from it and I can’t, but then I realise that’s because I enjoy it.”

Both as a consumer and creator of art, Jojo seems drawn towards this complex darkness. Alongside Stevenson, she references Patti Smith and Edgar Allan Poe; in her own work, she considers both international warfare and internal conflict. It’s perhaps part of the reason why Heartworms seems to have resonated so strongly - like people’s morbid fascination with true crime, art such as hers allows us to explore the shadowy, unsavoury side of human nature without necessarily having to confront it within ourselves. “[Art] puts a film over it that isn’t too exposing,” she affirms. “The painting or poem or song is the film - the covering - that’s holding back the complete monster of what’s behind the artwork, or within the recipient.” She laughs: “And I’m not saying monster as in EVIL, but everyone has one inside them.”

Nowhere is this theory better proved than in the war room. As Jojo says, “war can be very animalistic… and then outside of that, it’s all uniform and decisions. People don’t realise from the outside how bad it is from the inside.” In terms of how we as a society relate to warfare, there is, perhaps, a similar sort of disconnect at play: as with art, the distance of history, geography, or privilege acts as a barrier, a degree of removal that allows us to use other people’s actions as magnets in our own moral compass.

That, she says, is why remembrance is so significant. “I got invited to the archives at RAF Hendon,” she shares, “and I thought, ‘Wow, all these letters that we don’t know about, all these memories that have been forgotten’. Working there is a reminder of what happened, of who they were as people.” In zooming in on these details - these forgotten footnotes of history - ‘Glutton For Punishment’ throws our general collective complacency into sharp relief.

The album’s dual centrepieces are a case in point: ‘Warplane’ sets bursts of choral vocals against a pounding electronic beat, echoing the dichotomy between the delicate craftmanship of the titular aircraft, and the intense ugliness of their purpose. “Oh look up there / We’ll be free / Oh look up there / We’ll be fine,” chants the chorus, its forceful optimism an eerie callback to ‘the old lie’ decried in Dulce et Decorum Est. The haunting hook of ‘Extraordinary Wings’, meanwhile, declares “I don’t wish murder / ‘Cos I got no right” - an apparently peaceable phrase that assumes a more sinister edge in the track’s video, where Jojo is cast as an Angel of Death accompanying a fallen fighter pilot on his final journey. “Memories are there to remind us, and memories are what make us,” she asserts. “It’s important to reflect, even if it is uncomfortable.”

“I find meaning behind anything that has a memory connected to it. I’m obsessed with my youth and my past.”

With ‘Glutton For Punishment’, Jojo has crafted a nuanced, sensitive time capsule of a record which marries matters of national memory with deeply personal ones, often using the former as a means through which to interpret the latter. There’s a childlikeness to the clipped vocal and ‘da da da’ refrain of ‘Mad Catch’, while ‘Smugglers Adventure’ - a track about the push-pull of craving independence yet yearning for parental affection - is built around a centre point of almost playground-like chanting. “I’m very connected to my childhood,” she acknowledges, explaining how her difficult upbringing has contributed to her enduringly “childlike” worldview. “There are a lot of people who have had trauma in the past and find it hard to grow past it.”

Continuing, she recalls: “I got punched in the face when I was living in the YMCA in Cheltenham, by a girl [who] I thought was my friend. It happened so suddenly… and I can’t even explain how it made me feel. As a person, I can’t hold something against someone; it was at a party, and she was probably drinking too much, you know? But it made me feel so small, so lonely… sometimes I still have dreams [about] it. I just couldn’t trust anyone [after that]. It made me quiet, reserved; it’s like I went back to being a child again.”

As well as restoring the confidence that was (quite literally) knocked out of her as a teenager, Heartworms has also fostered something of a community around Jojo - a collection of fellow music lovers, military history enthusiasts and misfits, whose support proves that she’s now far from alone. Has having the project as an emotional outlet, or a means through which to process her experiences, helped her feel better understood?

“Uh, no,” she says simply, then gives a small laugh. “Not by the people who know me, at all. By the strangers, yes; [there’s] something about strangers who know you better through your music than people who actually know you in real life that’s very weird. But they only know you as Heartworms,” she holds out one hand, “and they only know you as Josephine,” she gestures with the other.

“My family still don’t know me as either Heartworms or Josephine.” (Although, she points out, her mum “understands [her] a lot better now”). “No matter how honest I am, there’s never an interest in… what’s behind my eyes. Does that make sense? If I’m talking to my family, it’s just [them] spilling whatever’s happening in their lives, then going ‘oh, how are you? How’s music?’.”

On first listen, ‘Glutton For Punishment’ is undeniably arresting - a formidable opening statement that sees Jojo distil the enigmatic essence of Heartworms while broadening the project’s musical parameters to compellingly incorporate elements of dance (‘Mad Catch’; ‘Warplane’) and pop (‘Celebrate’) with her EP’s post-punk roots. (“There’s a way of making something catchy, but also beautiful,” she grins). But it’s also a record that rewards repeat listens in spades, each spin unravelling its spool of memories a little bit more. Lyrically, she eulogises both personal innocence, and that of the “many souls unjustly sacrificed in the name of war” (as the video for ‘Extraordinary Wings’ puts it).

Structurally, there’s a powerful circularity at play: the final verse of opener proper ‘Just To Ask A Dance’ is echoed in the closing title track, quietly reaffirming the idea that we just can’t escape what’s come before - and, in some cases, nor should we try to. “The idea of the bookend songs, the repetition of the start… that’s literally what my life is.” But, we suggest, while the words are the same, the emotion has changed - where ‘Just To Ask A Dance’ is brooding and confrontational, ‘Glutton For Punishment’ is softer, simpler, and the most vulnerable she’s ever sounded. In other words, the past might inform our present selves, but it doesn’t completely define them. “Yeah,” Jojo smiles, “it is like a different light is shone onto the memory towards the end. Being able to be so much more emotional… it’s like I was waiting to save it for the album.”

As thoughts turn to bracing the January chill once more, Jojo picks up one of the beautifully bound books on the table between us, flicking through it for a quote to leave us with. “This one is about time,” she smiles, “from Goethe’s Faust: ‘What glitters, lives but for the moment; what has real worth, survives for all posterity’.”

‘Glutton For Punishment’ is many things, but it’s certainly not glittery. Make of that what you will…

‘Glutton For Punishment’ is out now via Speedy Wunderground.

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