Mary In The Junkyard reveal ‘Candelabra’ from debut album ‘Role Model Hermit’

One of the oldest songs in Clari Freeman-Taylor's catalogue, 'Candelabra' is Mary In The Junkyard at their most stripped back: solo voice, sparse arrangement, and more emotional weight than anything this quiet should carry.

Mary In The Junkyard press photo by Daisy and Tomos Ayscough, 2026

Mary In The Junkyard have shared ‘Candelabra’, the latest single from their debut album ‘Role Model Hermit’, due 3rd July via AMF Records.

Where lead single ‘Crash Landing’ announced the album with trip-hop drums and soaring strings, ‘Candelabra’ takes a different approach entirely. Essentially a solo piece for vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Clari Freeman-Taylor, it is one of the older songs in the band’s catalogue, written long before the recording sessions that produced the album.

Freeman-Taylor has described it as containing “all of my teenage angst”, a glimpse of unvarnished adolescent self-doubt set against bittersweet melody rather than the band’s more expansive sound.

The contrast is deliberate. Mary In The Junkyard have always moved between emotional registers with unusual ease, and ‘Role Model Hermit’ appears designed to contain multitudes: the album was recorded last summer with producers Oli Bayston (Everything Is Recorded, Olivia Dean) and Ben Baptie (The Strokes, Young Fathers, Little Simz), and the band have described it as a record “full of stories, memories and past lives” that listeners can “get lost in, like a forest or a cave.”

The London trio are former NME cover stars and have recently toured the US with Wet Leg, previewing new material at a special show at Camden’s Elephant’s Head for So Young magazine.

‘Role Model Hermit’ is out 3rd July.



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