Before a listening party at Heaven Can Wait, a tiny NYC venue, Orla Gartland performs with an exuberant, almost Muppet-like energy on her acoustic guitar. With a mix of older songs and unreleased material from her new record Everybody Needs a Hero, the 29-year-old songwriter takes the audience for a ride. Upbeat, tongue-in-cheek songs like “Codependency” from her debut record Woman on the Internet rub shoulders with the devastating new track “Mine.” Gartland herself is in mischievous form, making deliberately over-the-top “bass faces” during Internet track “Madison.” To Gartland’s delight, the audience (a mix of industry, press and longtime Gartland fans from her mailing list) is totally on board with the unpredictable set list. The crowd vocalizes every countermelody and guitar line; they’ve waited almost a decade for Gartland to come to New York, though Gartland did visit with her friend Dodie’s band in 2021.
The stripped-back performance is something of a full-circle moment for Gartland, who started out in Dublin uploading covers and originals onto YouTube in the early 2010s. Her early music was rooted in an obsession with Laura Marling, even going to the locales mentioned in her music (like the bench on Shepherd’s Bush Green) upon her first trip to London. As time went on, Gartland found herself increasingly alienated from the waifish expectations of the “female singer-songwriter” archetype. Gartland tells Xtra that the idea of a singer-songwriter conjures “such an indulgent sad thing … but I contain many more multitudes than that.”
For the first several years of releasing music, she tried on several different styles: after the early Marling-indebted Roots EP (currently only purchasable on Gartland’s Patreon), there was the electro-pop of “Lonely People” and the nu-disco of “I Go Crazy.” Exploring different genres ultimately helped her define her sound: “I think knowing what you don’t want is sometimes just as helpful as knowing what you do want. Because if you knew what you did want, everyone would just make one album and then give up.”
It wasn’t until her debut proper, 2021’s Woman on the Internet when she settled on something to match her boisterous personality: distorted guitars, dry drums and bright vocal melodies. That album depicts a search for identity; she’s yearning to swap bodies with an influencer, trying not to turn into her mother and, most absurdly, wishing to become someone’s houseplant. On her follow-up, Everybody Needs a Hero, she fully takes the reins, producing the album with longtime collaborators Peter Miles and Tom Stafford (and an assist on one song from Ellie Goulding’s early producer, Starsmith). Whether she’s fretting about guilt on the feisty “Backseat Driver” or ditching a toxic relationship on the Feist-y “Sound of Letting Go,” Gartland is now letting us into her brain instead of trying to escape it.
Between her first two albums, two major events happened: one, a needle drop on Netflix’s queer hit Heartstopper, and two, a maximalist, almost prog-rock side project with Dodie, Gartland’s creative director Greta Isaac, and Martin Luke Brown called FIZZ. For the first season of Heartstopper, writer and show creator Alice Oseman penned the closing scene of Episode 2 with Gartland’s song “Why Am I Like This?” in mind when the character Nick types the question “am I gay?” into the search bar. It was a perfectly appropriate breakthrough moment for Gartland, who, like the character, is bisexual.
As for FIZZ, the quartet spent two weeks at rural residential studio Middle Farm, throwing every single idea they had at the wall with Middle Farm owner Miles at the helm. The result was The Secret To Life, a maximalist homage to ’60s and ’70s psychedelic rock. Gartland reflects fondly on that experience, particularly the relief at a project “that wasn’t this heavy diary entry, and just goofy for the fun of it.” Gartland would later return to Middle Farm for Everybody Needs a Hero, with Miles on co-production.
That sense of collaboration fed back into Gartland’s solo music. She invited UK rocker Declan McKenna to join on “Late To The Party,” a twitchy tempo-changing highlight recently playlisted on BBC’s Radio 1. “I think he’s a modern great,” Gartland says of McKenna. “He not only understood the assignment but he recorded loads of guitars and went above and beyond.” She also wrote multiple songs with longtime friend Lauren Aquilina, a quietly ubiquitous songwriter whose great Ashlee Simpson-nodding single “Empathy” shares DNA with co-write “The Hit.” The liner notes for Hero feature little annotations from Gartland, shouting out Aquilina’s “Backseat Driver” backing vocals (where she writes “maybe my fave BV part on the record”) and the three drummers on “Three Words Away” (“yeah—a lot of drums on this one.”). The collaborative spirit even extends to her audience; she posted the stems for lead single “Little Chaos” for fans to remix. She particularly marvels that someone mashed up “Chaos” with the Thomas & Friends theme.
Everybody Needs a Hero almost entirely centres around a single relationship, giving a 360-degree view of Gartland and her partner navigating each other’s emotional baggage. If that sounds potentially repetitive, Gartland finds nuance and humour at every turn, referring to her music as “I love you, but …” songs. “I’m a strong believer that life is nuanced, and sometimes songs, particularly pop songs are not … I’ve never seen any relationship I’ve been in in such a black-and-white way,” she says. Many writers tackle the topics of dysfunctional relationships, but few write about the more specific emotions of long-term partnership—and fewer still approach the subject with the same loopy glee as Gartland. On “Backseat Driver,” she struggles with expressing her emotions to her partner, but it’s punctuated with bratty “la-la-las” and neurotic silliness like “Guilt is like a bad apple, rotten to the core/ I couldn’t even tell you what the hell I even said that for.”
The most notable exception to the narrative is “The Hit,” about a sisterly relationship with another woman. It features some of her sharpest writing to date about enmeshed emotions:
“I don’t wanna burden with how I’ve been feeling
It’s just my perception of what you’re perceiving
I’m thinking your thoughts before you even get there.”
Intense female friendship, queer or not, is often an ouroboros, where two people socialized to be other-directed end up emotionally fused—a natural extension of themes throughout Gartland’s catalogue. When asked about “The Hit” and similar woman-focused songs like “More Like You” or “Madison,” Gartland elaborates: “Women are so amazing, I’m obsessed with them and I’m terrified of all the women in my life. There’s just a wholeness and an ability to hold detail in nuance that is so powerful. And I’m not saying that men are not capable of that same nuance, but there’s something very female to me about seeing all of [a relationship].”
The record’s experimentation reflects this willingness to hold multiple truths. It’s not just the showy, tempo-changing songs that push Gartland to her limits, but the slower songs as well. Miles convinced her to record two songs directly to tape: “Simple,” a rare straightforward love song, and “Mine,” a string-led ballad with the most vulnerable set of lyrics that Gartland’s released so far. Despite her initial nerves about a potentially “Disney” arrangement, Gartland praises the dissonant, ultimately moving results: “‘Mine’ is not sad in a straightforward way, and it doesn’t want to be empowering and expansive; it’s a song about assault … [co-producer Tom Stafford] put a couple of notes in there that make me wince, but I love that about it.”
Gartland’s fearlessness is everywhere in the creation of this album, even the aspects that most artists tend to skip. Like Internet, Orla Gartland worked on the mix with Charli XCX’s engineer Geoff Swan—Gartland joked that after BRAT’s smash success, “do NOT think of how high his fee is going to be for album 3.” On the first album, the amount of mix revisions went into the double digits; she knew exactly what she wanted this time around. Even for mastering, where most musicians rarely participate, she was involved, going back for multiple sessions at Abbey Road Studios with Christian Wright (whose credits happen to include Laura Marling.)
Gartland eventually hopes to produce for other artists besides herself. She says that early on in her career, “I was in spaces where I would come in and say ‘Hey, I’d really like to start with the beat I made,’ and sometimes I would be told ‘No, I’m the producer, you’re the artist, go feel your feelings over there and I’ll do the beats.” It’s obviously condescending to suggest that someone cannot ‘feel their feelings’ and ‘do the beats’ simultaneously, but if anyone needed proof that those are not mutually exclusive, Gartland is one such example.
The production aspect is just the latest part of Gartland that’s starting to emerge fully formed. All of these disparate parts are important to understanding Gartland as an artist and human, and Everybody Needs a Hero comes the closest she ever has to integrating those parts into a whole. And she’ll keep getting closer: “I’ll probably make another album and be like ‘No, this is the most [Orla Gartland album].’ But that’s how it is, isn’t it?”
Everybody Needs a Hero is available to stream or purchase now.
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