Orla Gartland Snaps Into Focus

The Dublin singer-songwriter talks working with Declan McKenna, her collaborative project FIZZ, harnessing chaos through visuals, and her upcoming album, Everybody Needs a Hero.

Orla Gartland Snaps Into Focus

Releasing demos of original songs on YouTube and her “Secret Demo Club” Patreon for nearly a decade, Orla Gartland is no stranger to effective, skeletal songwriting. Sharing tales of insecurity, heartbreak and disillusionment is Gartland’s forte, and the Dublin singer-songwriter found herself determined to turn that into a focused effort for her sophomore record, Everybody Needs A Hero (out October 4).

The nearly year-long rollout for her debut, 2021’s Woman on the Internet, and being forced to do everything remotely due to COVID restrictions left Gartland feeling detached. “There’s a marked difference in how I’ve organized my time for this album—a lot of it is in person, which is obviously lovely because it was quite hard for Woman on the Internet,” she says. “The fact that it was all remote was quite hard and it made the album release feel quite abstract. I felt like it was all just sort of happening over there somewhere.” Gartland now has the privilege of taking her solo music across the world with her for the first time. “For this album release, I’m coming to New York in a few weeks. I’m doing a little showcase, and I’m going to Berlin next week. It’s a lot more in person, which is helping it feel much more tangible.”

The rollout for Everybody Needs A Hero has come into frame as her collaborative project FIZZ sees itself off. FIZZ was a spontaneous project formed by Gartland alongside longtime collaborators and friends Martin Luke Brown, Greta Isaac and dodie (who Gartland has been a touring guitarist for since 2017). The project culminated in the album The Secret to Life, a maximalist and theatrical departure from the tender and subtle songwriting the members had been known for. “To get to do that with my best friends was like the coolest thing ever. I feel like we’re gonna look back on that when we’re all much older and be like, ‘That was so cool,’” she gushes.

Despite passing lead vocal duties being passed between each member, every song was written entirely collaboratively while in the studio. “One of the core values of the band was like, everything is done all together—no previous ideas were really brought in,” Gartland continues. “We worked really fast on the music so it had to be passed around like a hot potato trying to work on instinct, no overthinking. I guess boygenius is similar in this way, but we really didn’t want there to be a frontperson. When we played live, it was all four of us across the front of the stage. We were trying to challenge our own instincts in that way, because what I didn’t want to do is just write an ‘Orla song’ and the other three are just playing on it. It felt very important to the DNA of the project to play into [each of our] strengths, but also challenge our strengths and swap as much as possible.”

When pivoting to Everybody Needs A Hero, Gartland found herself caught in a liminal space between the hyper-collaborative focus of FIZZ and being back on her own. “I did get used to leaning on those guys and discussing every decision that goes into being an artist,” she admits. “Those decisions can be creative ones in a studio setting, like how your vocal sounds and how your drums should sound, but there’s also a lot of administrative, ‘running a small business’ decisions. We shared the workload out with Fizz and made those decisions together.” Being the only “wearing the hat,” as she puts it, took some getting used to. “That was the thing I needed to relearn,” Gartland continues, “but I was happy to do it. I learned so much working as a group that I’m so glad that I had that experience. It taught me a lot about communication and collaboration.”

Gartland collaborated with fellow FIZZ member Greta Isaac on the visuals for Everybody Needs A Hero. The goal in mind was to create a fully-fleshed, aesthetical world. Inspired both by the bold superhero color schemes implied by the album’s title and the tracklist’s recurring themes of womanhood, Gartland and Isaac built a bedroom set that captured their interpretation of those themes. The shoot for lead single “Little Chaos” strikes an unintentional similarity to Darla from Finding Nemo, as Gartland is pictured with a menacing expression holding up a bagged goldfish.

“[‘Little Chaos’] is about being the loudest, most full version of yourself and showing up in a relationship like that with all of your jagged edges and not really trying to make a point not to round them off to be more palatable. That’s why we wanted the photos to be really really overstimulated—headphones on, the hair is static, my expression is just so angry. There’s wind coming through the window and it feels like all of your senses are alive and on,” Gartland recounts. “The goldfish wast a reference to a story that I told Greta in a completely different context a few months earlier where I told my dad to fuck off for the first time when I was 10 or 11 at a local Catholic church funfair, and I had this goldfish that I won in my hand. I just think it’s so comical that it made its way into the photo shoot.” Gartland is quick to assure me that it was a CGI goldfish: “No goldfishes were harmed in the making of these photos.”

Today, Gartland has released the fifth single off Everybody Needs a Hero, “Late to the Party,” which enlists British singer-songwriter Declan McKenna for guitar work and vocals on the bridge. It’s the first time she’s released a song with a feature, saying she’s “always been so precious about giving my stories to people and I really wanted to save it for like the right person and the right moment.” Coming up in the same crop of musicians, her reverence for McKenna made his inclusion seem like a no-brainer. “I think he’s like a modern great,” she beams. “He screams legacy artist to me, even though he’s a contemporary person making music now. There’s just something so classic about him. He shape-shifts a lot. I don’t know if I see that very much anymore.”

“Late to the Party” finds Gartland tapping into dance-punk, influenced heavily by Talking Heads and St. Vincent, chock full of tempo changes and jagged guitar licks. It’s about being in a relationship with someone and realizing you’ve inherited that person’s entire history. “Not just them at that moment, but everything that’s come before you—past partners, past traumas, family stuff; all of it comes with you,” she explains. “I sent [Declan] the song and I was delighted to know he was up for it. He had to play remotely; he added loads of guitar parts and, at first, he was adding more production than anything else because he’s a great producer. I really wanted him to have a moment in the song when you’re singing so we got together in person in Brighton. And we wrote a new bridge for him to sing something that felt like him.”

Like her influences, Orla Gartland isn’t afraid to make sacrifices in order to arrive at her best work, even when doing so proves challenging. Her songwriting is thoughtful and poignant as ever, as she enters the second decade of her career and is opening up her process to her peers. It’s clear, too, that she has no intention of slowing down anytime soon, and Everybody Needs a Hero is a perfect document of how Gartland is exactly where she’s meant to be—and, despite the “Late to the Party” title, she’s arrived right on time.

Listen to “Late to the Party” below.

 
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