Pitchfork Review: mary in the junkyard’s Role Model Hermit
7.6
The London trio updates the naive humanism of 2000s indie-folk with modern dread and restless experimentation on its ambitious full-length debut.
A couple of years ago, the three members of mary in the junkyard flew to New York City from London with no plan other than to play for whoever would have them. It’s not hard to imagine them busking in the subway tunnels, their semi-acoustic music rich with the earnest anguish of Big Thief and the grandeur of early Arcade Fire, the lyrics delivered in a feathery register by singer Clari Freeman-Taylor. When they asked the crowd at the Bowery Ballroom if anyone had a place where they could stay, a film producer named Todd Eckert offered up the flat he shared with his partner. This is how mary in the junkyard came to live with perhaps the most famous performance artist of all time, Marina Abramović. In an interview with The Times of London, bassist Saya Barbaglia says she “calls us her children.”
Aesthetically, it’s a fair assessment. Like their patron, mary in the junkyard’s work is rooted in an experimentalism that’s pruned into the kinds of shapes a passing commuter can quickly understand. On Role Model Hermit, their full-length debut, drums fall like the last fat drops of a midday downpour. Choruses are stage-whispered. There are the kinds of cello lines and and doo doo doo backing vocals that haven’t been fashionable since the days of Veckatimest, but the naive humanism of late 2000s American indie folk is replaced by a humming menace that feels like a product of 2026. Every song is big enough to fill a concert hall; every song is small enough to fit in a dorm room. Listening to it, you feel like you’re sitting only a few feet away from Freeman-Taylor, trying to decide how long you should stare into her eyes, knowing she won’t blink away.
If this all feels a little twee to you, well, it does to me, too, and I haven’t even mentioned that Freeman-Taylor and Barbaglia met when they were assigned by a camp counselor to perform the plucky Maurice Ravel piece that Wes Anderson used to score part of The Royal Tenenbaums. But the level of attention the duo and their bandmate David Addison bring to their songs gives them an emotional depth that takes them far beyond the precious or cutesy. Even at their most structured—the excellent “Seek and Destroy,” say, with its distorted Fairport Convention fingerpicking and Freeman-Taylor’s soft declaration that she “always take[s] too long to think”—these songs drift through a murk of frustrated ambition; “I don’t have the body or the mind to stay out tonight,” Freeman-Taylor sings, “I’m already halfway home.” From somewhere behind her, a bandmate gives off a death metal growl.
Even if you didn’t know mary in the junkyard were roommates in their early days, you might sense it in the mutual dependence of their playing. Freeman-Taylor’s thin and crinkling voice is like no other in indie rock; even at her most grounded, she sounds like she’s reading faint pencil markings off a piece of tissue paper. Addison’s percussion in “New Muscles” rattles around her like a game of Plinko as she and Barbaglia deadpan about the sick gains they’re making in the gym. Their voices move at a one-two rhythm, like they’re doing tandem arm curls. In “Welcome Break,” she and Barbaglia string together a nest of violin and viola that cradles her voice and lets her sing comfortably about seeing the eyes of God flash in the bushes behind a gas station.
The sense of connectedness between band members gives their songwriting an added poignance. “I’ll let you down if you let me in,” Freeman-Taylor sings over a tangle of guitar in “Blood,” Addison’s nearly inaudible spoken harmonies adding to the song’s feeling of domestic intimacy. Like many of the songs here, there’s so much unsaid that the music implies—when Freeman-Taylor sings “I believe in us,” you don’t doubt her, but you sense that she’s tired of saying so. And when the song thrusts toward its climax and she sings about love making you “naked,” there’s little of the ecstasy of deep physical connection. Instead, it’s the hollow relief of finally having sex with someone with whom you’re desperately trying not to lose touch, and who you can see fading away. The band streaks a Beach House drone behind “Crash Landing” in a way that makes Freeman-Taylor’s resolve sound fresh and revelatory. “You opened up—you opened up like a coconut,” she sings over and over. In her voice, it sounds like a common phrase, even a cliché, which it obviously is not. Imagine how tired you might feel if you had to hack away with a machete every time you needed a little nourishment.
Throughout the album, mary in the junkyard shift constantly, moving from crumbling atmospheric experiments to cloudy Pacific Northwest indie rock to the kind of straightforward classical guitar poems of Leonard Cohen’s early albums. Most bands cast around stylistically on their debut in search of a sound they can call their own. But each of these songs feels self-contained, almost hermetic, with a sense of dread growing at the edges like mold in a moist room. Role Model Hermit is clearly the work of a band who knows exactly who they are and exactly what they’re capable of.