Mary in the Junkyard Have Been Building Toward This
Mary in the junkyard have been building their world quietly, on their own terms. Since forming in 2022, the London trio, comprising vocalist and guitarist Clari Freeman-Taylor, bassist and viola player Saya Barbaglia, and drummer David Addison, have described their sound as “angry weepy chaos rock.” They have released sparingly, a single here, an EP there, choosing instead to hone themselves on stage. Now, the moment has arrived. The band have announced their debut album, ‘Role Model Hermit,’ due July 3 via AMF Records, alongside lead single ‘Crash Landing.’
The eleven-track record follows their acclaimed 2024 EP ‘This Old House’ and was produced by Oli Bayston, known for his work with Olivia Dean and Everything is Recorded, alongside co-producer Ben Baptie, whose credits include The Strokes, Young Fathers, and Little Simz. The band describe the album as a record “full of stories, memories and past lives” that listeners can “get lost in, like a forest or a cave, where you can shelter inside for a while to rest and recover.” The album artwork traces Clari’s imagined life as a sailor, another thread in the expanding lore of this band.
‘Crash Landing’ Is Something New for Them
‘Crash Landing’ arrives slow and open. Freeman-Taylor’s vocals sit above soaring strings arranged by Saya Barbaglia and David Addison, and a trip-hop groove that gives the track room to breathe and shift. The video, directed by Maisy Banks and Jacob Ray and shot on film along the white-cliffed beaches of Dover, uses footage of murmurations: birds moving in formation through a pale sky. It is the right image for a song about the disorientation that follows losing someone.
Freeman-Taylor has spoken about the track from two angles worth holding together. To one outlet she described it as joyful, born from the band’s love of harmonium drones and their time on tour listening to Life Without Buildings, channelling what she called “chirpy scatty poetry.” To another, she went somewhere more direct: “It’s about fear and how men often rely on keeping their emotions secret, and how you have to crack them open. To be the only one that’s seeing one side of someone, it’s trapping.” The lyric “you opened up, you opened up like a coconut” holds both readings at once.
To celebrate the record, the band have lined up a string of UK in-store appearances across July, running from Banquet Records in Kingston on July 2 through to Assai in Glasgow on July 10, with stops at Rough Trade East, Rough Trade Bristol, Rough Trade Nottingham, Rough Trade Liverpool, Vinyl Whistle in Leeds, and HMV Manchester in between. ‘Role Model Hermit’ is out July 3. The door is open.
