mary in the junkyard chase the mouse

Once upon a time, there was a mouse. The mouse was happy because it had a friend: an old fisherman, the kind with a big bushy beard and a big, greasy-looking oilskin. The mouse lived in one of the oilskin’s pockets, where it was warm and safe, even when the two got lost in storms. But that was a long time ago, and both the mouse and the fisherman are long dead. Over many generations, the fisherman was reincarnated over and over again; so was the mouse. The two were separated, an unfortunate side effect of the rebirth process. When Clari Freeman-Taylor realized she was the latest reincarnation of that fisherman, she figured she’d probably already met her mouse. She wasn’t sure who it had been, but it stood to reason that they’d crossed paths at some point. 

“We must have met everyone before, really,” she muses, looking upward as she imagines the thousands of universes she’s already lived through.

In this one, she’s the vocalist and guitarist for mary in the junkyard, a British trio proving to be one of the most exciting new acts on the indie circuit. They count Deftones as fans, and they’ve already toured with Wet Leg. Now, mary in the junkyard is releasing their debut album, Role Model Hermit, and the band has let me peek into its strange little world to celebrate its birth—or, at least, its birth in this universe. 

It’s a heady Monday in May, the day after a show, and the band is lounging in Elizabeth Street Garden in New York. Freeman-Taylor is knitting a sweater; she hadn’t expected the city to be this chilly. mary in the junkyard are seat-of-your-pants people: a chance encounter with Marina Abramović’s longtime partner, Todd Eckert, on a night when the band didn’t have a hotel turned into both a lasting friendship and, luckily, a place to sleep. 

I ask whether Eckert and Abramović had any influence on the making of the album. mary in the junkyard look at me like I’ve got three eyes. “They’re just our friends,” Freeman-Taylor shrugs. Touring with Wet Leg last year, the band spent its time between gigs seeing what small-town kindness might bring them. Dickinson, North Dakota, was a highlight: there was a dinosaur museum and a friendly casino regular in the local saloon who taught them blackjack. “We were just losing every hand [to them],” drummer David Addison remembers. “Really lovely people.”

That openness—the willingness to embrace change—isn’t something they were taught at the string quartet summer camp where Freeman-Taylor first met bassist/violist Saya Barbaglia. At the time, Freeman-Taylor was already in a band with Addison while writing songs of her own. “But I didn’t really want to play on my own,” she says. So she asked Addison and Barbaglia to join her for a gig. That show, meant to be a one-off, took place on June 5, 2022. The band now celebrates the date as its birthday. Last year, they marked the occasion with a barbecue; this year, to celebrate turning four, they’re releasing their debut album, Role Model Hermit, on AMF Records. 

The album is the soundtrack to cleaning out your enigmatic aunt’s benevolently haunted attic—a weird, captivating collection of musical ephemera. It’s full of fables and half-remembered histories, universes contorted into strange shapes. The trio began writing it on their first tour through New York—the same trip they met Eckert and Abramović—and recorded it in London with producer Oli Bayston last August. “It’s quite an inspiring place,” Freeman-Taylor says of NYC. “You write good stuff if you’re feeling good, and I really love being on tour.” 

One of the defining songs from that songwriting period is “Mouse,” a musical retelling of Freeman-Taylor’s past-life fisherman story. One night, alone in a friend’s art studio, she felt the song spill out. The result is the album’s stormy finisher, all suspended strings, hitches of breath, and seaborne guitar plucks. It’s the sound of something remembered, an old folktale resurfacing in Freeman-Taylor’s subconscious. And that’s exactly how she likes it. The mouse in question appears on Role Model Hermit’s cover. The fisherman, too. The band briefly convinces me the latter is an old relative of Freeman-Taylor’s—a sepia photograph rescued from the family albums. It’s actually a picture of her wearing old-man prosthetics, a reveal that makes me want to crawl out of my skin and get my eyesight checked. 

The night before our interview, I wander sleepily into the Bowery Ballroom, where mary in the junkyard is co-headlining a charity concert for War Child with Dove Ellis. The first thing I see is someone wearing a Geese shirt. I decide to take it as a good omen. Live, Freeman-Taylor’s voice is sugared, almost childlike. It recalls Sue Tompkins’s lilt on Any Other City, if Sue Tompkins were a possessed doll. Beneath it, Barbaglia’s bass rumbles and burns, hardness pushing against softness. At one point, Freeman-Taylor forgets the lyrics entirely. She beams at the crowd and sings, “blah, blah, blah, blah, blah!” During a swinging rendition of the snarling “New Muscles,” she and Barbaglia—both dressed in quirky athleisure—play-fight across the stage, giggling as they swipe and duck around each other. The music is spooky and cozy, putting the bearded thirty-somethings—who seem to apparate at any and all Brooklyn venues—in an indie-rock trance. I sway along with them, snake-charmed by the band’s slippery songs.

Freeman-Taylor’s conversational manner isn’t all that different from her stage presence. She gives the impression of someone who has only recently landed on Earth, dispatched from some mysterious planet. The daughter of a drama teacher and an environmental advocate, both creatives in their own right, Freeman-Taylor grew up in Kimpton, a thousand-year-old village north of London. “When I was a child, there was a really kind woman called Mary,” she recalls. “So it has a nice place in my memory. And then junkyards. I think that the world is a bit like a junkyard. It’s just lots of stuff that washes up that’s very random.” 

“You’ve got to piece together the junk,” Barbaglia adds.

Role Model Hermit feels assembled from those found bits and bobs. Reverb-soaked guitars, unorthodox song structures, and Freeman-Taylor’s ghostly soprano combine into something that doesn’t sound like anything else I’ve heard in a while. “[Todd] thinks that we sound like we’ve heard a lot of rock music, but misunderstood it, which I think that’s such a productive thing,” Addison says matter-of-factly, launching into an enthusiastic digression about post-punk bands making pop music badly enough that they accidentally invent something new. It’s an apt way to describe mary in the junkyard, a band doing rock music slightly wrong but to thrilling results. 

The trio has come into their own, relishing the space their art can provide. “The thing that everyone deserves is freedom and happiness,” Freeman-Taylor says. “Writing the album, it was about my life at that point, and I was feeling a lot happier and freer. Saya always reminds me of my own autonomy. Saya is a champion of freedom, freeing your mind and doing what you want to do.” That sentiment echoes through opening track “Mantra III,” a song the band says it had to “fight the suits” to keep on Role Model Hermit. “It is yours, babe / You deserve it,” Freeman-Taylor whispers over a ragged viola and submerged bassline, the affirmation aimed at the listener and the band itself.

Role Model Hermit is roomier and freer than the group’s sinuous, eclectic 2024 EP this old house. “That was more about the city,” Addison explains. “Now, the album takes place in bigger spaces, outdoor spaces.” The songs span oceans and life-cycles, magic spells and imaginary friends. Freeman-Taylor went through a breakup as the debut was forming. “I think breakups are actually really great,” she announces. I nearly choke on my coffee. “You get to experience yourself again. I had a really amazing breakup before the album; I felt like I was so happy.” That breakup led to “Crash Landing,” a drum-forward, surprisingly empathetic dissection of a relationship on its last legs. Its counterpart, “Blood,” is a toothy, moody love song built around an addictive guitar loop and Freeman-Taylor purring over a sparse landscape of strings. “The amazing breakup to amazing relationship pipeline,” she says of the songs. Later, I write the phrase down in my journal as a keepsake.

One of my favorite cuts from the record is “Myrtle,” a moody ode to an oft-absent loved one driven by a bluesy guitar riff that recalls the modern alt-country canon. “Myrtle told me that I don’t need to worry, / She will get to me when the time comes,” Freeman-Taylor sighs before the song bursts into a gorgeous, twinkly bridge—one of the album’s high-water marks. “Welcome Break,” meanwhile, opens with Kid A-style fingerpicking, its arpeggios rising and falling with a narcotizing effect. “I am talking to myself / Learning to rely on no one else,” Freeman-Taylor promises herself over a bed of oceanic guitars. 

“We have the sort of beautiful angelic ethereal stuff—that’s the Mary—and then this junkyard, which is the grime and the grunge and the textural sort of chaos that we do as well,” Addison says with a smile. “It’s kind of a mantra, in a way.” He points to the band’s Instagram bio: “angry weeping chaos rock trio.” Freeman-Taylor cuts in. “I think I might change it! To ‘teetering on the edge of a rock.’ That really describes our sound.” 

mary in the junkyard does this often, cutting one another off and picking up where the others leave off. Over the years, they’ve developed into something of a hive mind. After their last tour, the trio decided to move in together, turning a cluster of neighboring London flats into the band’s headquarters. Barbaglia and Addison share one apartment, while Freeman-Taylor lives two doors down. “When there’s something to be done, like a music video, it takes over the whole entire house,” Barbaglia says. “Everyone’s kind of just talking about this project for two weeks. And then the next week we’ve moved on to something like football, or pole dancing.” 

It’s an unusual arrangement. After the late nights and cramped North Dakota hotel rooms that come with touring, most bands would probably want some space. “If it gets too intense, I guess we could move a bit further away from each other,” Barbaglia admits. “Like, maybe a minute walk away.” She and Freeman-Taylor smile conspiratorially at each other. They don’t believe that’ll happen anytime soon.

Role Model Hermit is out July 3 on AMF.

Miranda Wollen is a staff writer at Paste and is based in New York City. Follow her @mirandakwollen or email her.

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