Clari Freeman-Taylor and Saya Barbaglia met at classical music summer camps when they were fourteen, and both play cello and viola alongside their guitars and basses, which means the strings on Role Model Hermit are load-bearing rather than decorative.
On ‘New Muscles’, the guitar is cut entirely and replaced with bass pounding against low-pitched cello and viola, clicky drums, and Freeman-Taylor’s voice moving between a hushed confession and something close to a snarl. “I embrace the thunder and the lightning,” she sings, “I’m a creature of only instinct.” The song was originally composed on an accordion as a nod to drummer David Addison joining a gym, and it ends up sounding like the clearest statement of what this band actually is.
The album was recorded in the immediate aftermath of Glastonbury, in a state of deliberate exhaustion. Addison said in interviews that exhaustion is when the brain throws out the craziest stuff, and producer Oli Bayston leaned into that: the wheezing harmonium creaks on ‘Crash Landing’ were kept in the mix because they sounded right rather than because they were tidy, and the recording has that quality throughout, things preserved for their texture rather than their polish.
Freeman-Taylor writes about a dog that eats her flesh and stays by her side, a mouse she knew in a past life, a stranger who hasn’t met her yet. The feelings in these songs are stated clearly; the biographical sources are kept to herself, which is either the album’s most distinctive quality or its main barrier depending on how much patience the listener brings. ‘Seek And Destroy’ builds a portrait of social anxiety ruining a potential night out through wild guitar and screamed vocals that arrive after three minutes of tightly held tension. ‘Thou Shalt Sprout’ draws on old folk harmonies in a way that Freeman-Taylor describes as feeling like the song already existed and she was just discovering it. I found myself going back to both more than I expected to.
The Wet Leg comparison will follow this band everywhere and is only partially deserved. The hushed twin vocals are the surface similarity and the surface is where the comparison ends, because the real influences are Modest Mouse’s off-kilter structures, American Football’s mathematical precision and Big Thief’s emotional directness. Sure, casual listeners will hear Wet Leg; but the careful ones will hear something significantly stranger.
The album closes on ‘Mouse’, with Freeman-Taylor as a fisherman in a past life finding the mouse she lost to the sea in the afterlife, layers of guitar and strings building and washing into silence around the line “Mouse, I’m so sorry we drowned / The sea swallowed us / And then spat us out.” Mary in the Junkyard have been playing these songs at the Windmill in Brixton for two years, and the album sounds like a band who know exactly what they have, which is a harder thing to achieve on a debut than it appears.
Editors’ Picks
- 2026 albums
- Album Review
- AMF Records
- Art Rock
- Indie Rock
- London
- Mary in the Junkyard
- Oli Bayston
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- Role Model Hermit
