Interview Orla Gartland: Pure Heroine

It’s just as well, then, that Orla herself has always favoured slightly blunter angles. Having been a stalwart presence in the alt-pop sphere since her 2019 debut EP ‘Why Am I Like This?’ (the title track of which made her even more of a cult name when it featured on the soundtrack for Netflix’s Heartstopper), she’s since carved out her own niche at the crossroads between musical accessibility and emotional complexity, deftly exploring love, life and early adulthood in a way that truly resonates with young people navigating the same.

If her lauded first full-length, 2021’s ‘Woman on the Internet’, cemented her as a master of this craft, then the fantastical interlude of FIZZ - a passion project-cum-supergroup she formed with best friends dodie, Greta Isaac and Martin Luke Brown - allowed her to take things up a notch, dipping her toe into more audacious, ostentatious waters.

“When I’ve worked on music in London, I always feel like there’s something on in the evening and I’m just running around like a fucking headless chicken,” she grins. “Plus, I feel really comfy here. I haven’t been in a lot of fancy studios in my time, but RAK and Abbey Road and all those kinds of spaces [aren’t] inspiring to me at all. They’re really stiff and posh, and I just don’t get on well in places like that. There are amazing instruments here and it is like an absolute playground, but it’s also very unpretentious.”

As it turns out, familiarity breeds not contempt, but content. Though she self-confessedly “can get a little bit micro-managey,” Orla explains that the collaborative process of making the FIZZ record allowed her to approach ‘…Hero’ with an open mind, imbuing her newborn with a sense of striking dynamism. “Because I care so much about what I do, I’m sometimes slightly precious about my projects,” she says sheepishly. “But with FIZZ I realised I didn’t do that because I just trust those guys completely - with my whole life, let alone a song.

“A similar thing happened with Dec,” she continues, referencing the new album’s storming Declan McKenna collab ‘Late To The Party’. “I hadn’t had anyone feature on a [solo] song before, and I also don’t LOVE the culture of just giving the second verse to some random artist you don’t know just to have your song do bits.” There’s a slight pause, as Orla gives the wry smile of someone to whom authenticity and artistic integrity clearly mean a lot. “Dec was my first choice for who I wanted to do it and he was down, which was amazing. So once he was in, it was just like ‘run wild! You’re here for a reason - do your thing!’”

This creative self-assurance isn’t anything new, per se; she’s always released her solo work via her own self-described “little label” New Friends. But on ‘…Hero’, Orla began to back herself more than ever before. “The older I get and the more I do this, the more sure I become that it just fits my personality to do things that way. I like being the boss, basically,” she smiles. “It’s not a question of authority necessarily, but I do think [being signed to a bigger label] just waters down the art a lot of the time; if there are lots of cooks in the kitchen, that’s where it can all get a bit murky.”

She notes that, in a post-‘Taylor’s Version’ world, there’s a far wider understanding of what it means to be independent and to own your own masters. Although her experience of self-releasing is “unhinged and very full on”, it’s also “incredibly important to [her]”. “What I love so much is not having someone breathing down my neck saying ‘the track list isn’t ready’ or ‘that song’s not good enough’,” she explains. “That’s the holy grail, in a way - the prize of all the hard work and having to self-fund it is that I get to call those shots. Yes, I might not have the marketing or the reach of someone with hundreds of thousands of pounds of Universal money behind them, but holistically, I do just feel so proud of this music. There’s a correctness that feels worth the slog.”

Last time DIY caught up with Orla, for an early LP2 preview, she hinted that the album was “me moving a little bit away from ‘nice’ and a bit more towards being quite unapologetically loud”. Here, the likes of ‘SOUND OF LETTING GO’ and ‘Late To The Party’ see her come good on that promise. “I gave you your favourite t-shirt / She gave you trust issues,” she sings on the latter - a stomping, semi tongue-in-cheek rage at her partner’s exes that’s both bolshy and brilliantly fun.

She grins: “I think something I learned from FIZZ is that it’s important to me for music to not take itself super seriously, because that’s just not who I am as a person. I remember when I first came to London, I kept writing songs like I was Laura Marling - everything was really minor and moody. And I thought, ‘Why isn’t this working?’ And it was because I’m not like that. I think you have to kind of filter your disposition [into your music], and the humour is important to me.”

Ultimately, it’s this commitment to being wholly herself which makes Orla’s second such an intriguing proposition. Offset against the humble sincerity of ‘Simple’ or the finger-picked intimacy of ‘Mine’, the pulsing beat of ‘Backseat Driver’ and cocky swagger of ‘Three Words Away’ reiterate that no person - and no relationship - is 100% perfect, 100% of the time. “Exactly. ‘If you really want me / Take me as I am’,” she affirms, quoting the record’s driving lead single ‘Little Chaos’. “That’s what a good relationship is, isn’t it? It’s bringing all of that to the table and having someone who holds all of it.”

And, though ostensibly a record about her current long-term relationship, in the end ‘Everybody Needs A Hero’ is as much about Orla’s relationship with herself as it is her partner. One aspect that’s particularly - but subtly - powerful, we suggest, is that it explores love from the perspective of a queer songwriter without that framing having to be explicit. LGBTQ+ artists are often treated in terms of their sexuality before their personality, but here, it’s all just Orla.

“It’s an undercurrent that runs through everything,” she nods. “The bi experience is so interesting to me, because sometimes I just don’t feel straight enough to be straight, and sometimes I don’t feel queer enough to be in those spaces either. It’s funny - there’s all these tropes of being greedy, or being indecisive, and I actually think it’s an incredibly lonely experience.” She gives a slightly self-deprecating laugh. “I’m not out here trying to represent all the bi people, but that is [my] perspective and that is a lot of what makes being in a relationship complicated for me and other bi people; there’s this sense of the other side of you that you might be neglecting.”

“When I made the songs, I was thinking a lot about the feminine urge to do it all; that’s kind of where the hero thing came from,” she says. “That’s certainly my experience, and I see it in my mam, her mam, my aunties, and so many of my female friends. There’s this kind of manic spinning plates energy.” She illustrates: “I want to be thriving in my career, a great partner, a great friend, to go to the gym five times a week… I don’t know where it comes from or what I’m trying to prove - or even to who, half the time - but I’m curious about it.

“My heroes are the people around me that I perceive to be navigating life in all its ups and downs and [are] retaining their sense of identity through that. I don’t think heroes need to be these aspirational people on pedestals that we’re looking up to. I think it’s almost more meaningful when they’re people we know in complete detail.”

Between the space-claiming, remit-pushing bangers and the understated beauty of its quieter moments, ‘Everybody Needs A Hero’ is at once messy and mature, a true-to-life encapsulation of what it is, really, to be young and in love. “As a person and as a personality, I’ve still got so much learning and growing to do,” Orla smiles. “There’s still a wavering sense of finding myself, but [this record] feels so much more sure of itself than album one, and everything that went before it. It is a process, but I love that; if everyone was just making music when they were a fully formed, fully realised person, I’m not sure how interesting that would be.”

‘Everybody Needs A Hero’ is out now via New Friends. 

Tags: Features, Interviews, From The Magazine, October 2024, Orla Gartland