A couple of years ago, the three members of mary in the junkyard flew to New York City from London with no plan other than to play for whoever would have them. It’s not hard to imagine them busking in the subway tunnels, their semi-acoustic music rich with the earnest anguish of Big Thief and the grandeur of early Arcade Fire, the lyrics delivered in a feathery register by singer Clari Freeman-Taylor. When they asked the crowd at the Bowery Ballroom if anyone had a place where they could stay, a film producer named Todd Eckert offered up the flat he shared with his partner. This is how mary in the junkyard came to live with perhaps the most famous performance artist of all time, Marina Abramović. In an interview with The Times of London, bassist Saya Barbaglia says she “calls us her children.”
Aesthetically, it’s a fair assessment. Like their patron, mary in the junkyard’s work is rooted in an experimentalism that’s pruned into the kinds of shapes a passing commuter can quickly understand. On Role Model Hermit, their full-length debut, drums fall like the last fat drops of a midday downpour. Choruses are stage-whispered. There are the kinds of cello lines and and doo doo doo backing vocals that haven’t been fashionable since the days of Veckatimest, but the naive humanism of late 2000s American indie folk is replaced by a humming menace that feels like a product of 2026. Every song is big enough to fill a concert hall; every song is small enough to fit in a dorm room. Listening to it, you feel like you’re sitting only a few feet away from Freeman-Taylor, trying to decide how long you should stare into her eyes, knowing she won’t blink away.
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If this all feels a little twee to you, well, it does to me, too, and I haven’t even mentioned that Freeman-Taylor and Barbaglia met when they were assigned by a camp counselor to perform the plucky Maurice Ravel piece that Wes Anderson used to score part of The Royal Tenenbaums. But the level of attention the duo and their bandmate David Addison bring to their songs gives them an emotional depth that takes them far beyond the precious or cutesy. Even at their most structured—the excellent “Seek and Destroy,” say, with its distorted Fairport Convention fingerpicking and Freeman-Taylor’s soft declaration that she “always take[s] too long to think”—these songs drift through a murk of frustrated ambition; “I don’t have the body or the mind to stay out tonight,” Freeman-Taylor sings, “I’m already halfway home.” From somewhere behind her, a bandmate gives off a death metal growl.
Even if you didn’t know mary in the junkyard were roommates in their early days, you might sense it in the mutual dependence of their playing. Freeman-Taylor’s thin and crinkling voice is like no other in indie rock; even at her most grounded, she sounds like she’s reading faint pencil markings off a piece of tissue paper. Addison’s percussion in “New Muscles” rattles around her like a game of Plinko as she and Barbaglia deadpan about the sick gains they’re making in the gym. Their voices move at a one-two rhythm, like they’re doing tandem arm curls. In “Welcome Break,” she and Barbaglia string together a nest of violin and viola that cradles her voice and lets her sing comfortably about seeing the eyes of God flash in the bushes behind a gas station.
