It’s a full decade since Orla Gartland walked into a cafe in Drumcondra, in Dublin, as a 19-year-old to chat about her ongoing journey from teenage YouTuber to independent musician. At that point – switched on, articulate but inexperienced – she had a couple of EPs under her belt and had forged a niche with millions of subscribers charmed by her bedroom cover versions. I remind her of an early gig at the Sugar Club where she sang the Kate Bush song Running Up That Hill, and her eyes widen with delight at the memory.
“Oh my God,” she yelps, grinning down the camera on a Zoom call from her compact, tidy studio in London, where she has lived since not long after our first meeting. “I think I knew it would be synched in Stranger Things all those years later,” she jokes. “Clearly ahead of my time.”
Forging her identity alongside an online presence was something that Gartland tackled in 2021, on her debut album, Woman on the Internet, a record that summarised, in her own words, “the chaos of your 20s”. Her second album, Everybody Needs a Hero, takes a more forthright approach to life and love, documenting the ups and downs of a long-term relationship, being a woman in the world and trying hard not to lose yourself.
Its opening lyric, “I thought I knew it all, I had the nerve / To feel so high above the learning curve,” is testament both to Gartland’s self-awareness and to her wry sense of humour. At 29, life is still chaotic, she says, but, having come up in the online world, she is less concerned by how she is perceived these days – although she is aware that she still needs to play the game to get her music heard. She experienced her first viral moment recently when her song Why Am I Like This? exploded on TikTok after it featured in the Netflix coming-of-age drama series Heartstopper.
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“That’s kind of the only song that’s run away with itself like that. It’s kind of crazy,” Gartland says. “It was an interesting moment for me, because the song had been out for a few years at that point. I kind of thought it had run its course, so for it to have this second wind was so cool. My whole career has been a marathon, not a sprint – it’s been very gradual – and that was the only moment that things got a bit crazy. I kind of felt like I was just observing something that was completely outside of me, in a cool way. I wasn’t even having this big egotistical moment about it. It was more about the song than it was about me. It was quite nice to see.”
When it came to writing songs for Everybody Needs a Hero, Gartland looked to the relationships in her life. She quietly admits that the five-year-long relationship that inspired many of the songs recently ended.
“It’s quite bizarre promoting an album of these songs about someone,” she says. “But it’s also nice. We were together for five years, so we’re still very good friends. I sent him the vinyl when I got them a few weeks ago, and said, ‘I think it’s important that you own this. You might also want to frisbee it into the bin, which is also fine,’” she adds with a chuckle. “The songs are like timestamps, so I think it’s so nice for me to have this little chronicle of how I felt at a certain time, even though I’m now in a different place.”
Gartland admits she had some “tough conversations” with her former partner while writing some of the songs, which she is adamant are “not mean or damning, but they are conflicted. My experience in relationships is just never as black and white as pop songs represent. I’m a bit more interested in the ‘I love you, but…’ moments.” Tracks such as Both Can Be True explore how difficult it can be to stay true to yourself in a relationship, with lines such as, “Oh make no mistake, I f**king love you / But this shit is hard. I guess that both can be true.”
Both the title and many of the album’s other songs are also inevitably coloured by her life experience as a woman. “I’ve observed behaviours in myself and in a lot of the girls and women around me,” she says. “I think it’s just a deeply female thing to go, ‘I want to be thriving in my career! I want to be a great friend! I want to be a great partner! I want to dress cool, but also be fit and healthy!’
“I don’t know where the pressure to do that even comes from, but I really observe it in myself. So that’s where the album cover, where I’m reaching for the phone, came from; I’m trying to help everyone but myself, and answering calls, yet no one’s asked me to spin this many plates. So the album’s about a relationship, but all of that was swimming around in the background at the same time.”
Gartland has always been drawn to pop songs with meaning. Everybody Needs a Hero is packed with them, from the frothy Kiss Ur Face Forever to the strident art-pop clatter of Little Chaos and the Blondie-meets-St Vincent new wave of Backseat Driver. Elton John recently played Late to the Party, a duet with Gartland’s fellow twentysomething indie-pop star Declan McKenna, on his Rocket Hour radio show on Apple Music. It is generally a more cohesive record than her charming patchwork quilt of a debut, but the thought-provoking lyrics underneath the catchy hooks are a facet of her songwriting that remains intact.
“That’s what I love in the music that I listen to,” Gartland says. “I think pop songs with meat on the bones of them are so powerful. You draw people in with the shiny-pop thing – and I do love a big chorus, and that kind of aesthetic, but shallow pop music that you give one listen to and you know what it’s about and you’re done... that is so much of what is pushed to us on the radio. I’m just much more interested in artists who make music that there’s still value on the fifth listen, where you hear something new, and go, ‘Oh God, I thought this was really happy, but it’s deeply sad!’ I think that’s so amazing when it’s done well.”
Making this album, Gartland says, has taught her a lot about herself. She has got better at speaking up for herself in studio settings, at being unapologetically candid and occasionally impolite. She laughs when I remind her that she once said that the worst thing someone could say about her music is that it’s nice.
“I’m quite glad, in hindsight, that I’ve had this slow ramp-up with my career,” she says. “Because I do think, as artists, that we’re kind of told to pursue these very quick highs. We’re all told that we need to go viral on TikTok, or we want this big surge of eyes and ears. And, actually, the more I observe those moments in other artists, the more grateful I am that I did not have that when I was younger – because I did spend years tiptoeing musically, being a bit noncommittal. ‘Is it pop? Is it this? Is it that? Where do I fit in?’ So I just feel so grateful now that I didn’t sign a deal when I was 19, because I feel so much more ready now.”
Gartland embarks on her first headline (and sold-out) tour of the United States in November. She told BBC this week “the amount of money I’m going to lose on that tour is really eye-watering” at about €40,000. But Gartland is determined to make it work.
Her next ambition is to record a Tiny Desk Concert for NPR. “It is a hard slog, and I’m under no illusions, but I feel like I want to give it a go,” she says of making waves stateside. “On album one, I couldn’t go over there for loads of reasons; with Covid, I couldn’t really tour. And also, to be honest, I couldn’t afford the visas and stuff, because it’s such a huge expense.
“So it’s nice to be at this point and feel like there are new things happening, and there are still lots of bucket-list things to tick off. And I’m also interested in how much they like Irish artists, for some reason. I want to cash in on that!” she jokes. “Well, no: this tour will actually financially ruin me, so there’s no cashing-in to be done. But I’m, like, get me on a Hozier support tour, hand me a Guinness and I will ham that shit up. Let me really get my accent going – this is my time to shine!”
Everybody Needs a Hero is released by New Friends
