Having established herself as one of Ireland’s best young artists with her acclaimed debut Woman On The Internet, Orla Gartland has now returned with a brilliant sophomore effort, Everybody Needs A Hero.
Originally published in Hot Press, 14 September 2024
It might be said that Orla Gartland fell to earth some 29 years ago. Crash site: Dublin, Ireland. If there was a question about Gartland’s otherworldliness, it might have been posed when she was 13, the year she started learning guitar and posting videos to YouTube, writing “dramatic, angry” songs as any young teen might.
In classic Irish fashion, she never told her classmates or friends about her musical endeavours for fear of being seen as arrogant or attention-seeking. But something lingered inside her, a desire to keep pushing forward as a musical artist. Eventually, she’d have to take a real stab at making music.
With this came the personal realisation that she couldn’t succeed in Ireland.
“I didn’t see a place for myself there,” she tells me over Zoom from her London studio. “I’m desperately not trying to be a dick and name anyone, but there were a lot of men with acoustic guitars in Ireland at the time and I didn’t feel inspired.”
The year was 2014. The month, October. Struggling to break through, Orla didn’t know how to define herself in a male-dominated industry. London beckoned. There, she thought she could see a way to carve out a space for herself. On the day she finished school, she packed her bags and headed to the UK. It took until 2021 for her to release her long-awaited debut album, Woman On The Internet, following on from a slew of EP releases.
The coming-of-age record was a chart hit and confirmed Gartland as a force to be reckoned with. In more recent years, meanwhile, she has joined forces with Dodie, Greta Isaac and Martin Luke Brown to form the indie-pop supergroup FIZZ, which has further enhanced her reputation.
Now, she has unleashed her sophomore LP Everybody Needs A Hero, a 12-track master’s thesis about the fallout of a long-term relationship and finding space for herself as a woman.
The opening track on Everybody Needs A Hero, ‘Both Can Be True’, is a piano-driven statement of intent. “I thought I knew it all,” Orla sings, “I had the nerve to feel so high above a learning curve.” It’s a pretty daring way to kick off the record.
“Towards the end of writing the album, I became kind of obsessed with the idea of superheroes,” explains Gartland. “Not like in the Marvel sense, but the image of a hero, someone who’s helping everyone out and doing it all. I looked at how that experience relates to being a woman, because I can see the instinct in me, in a lot of my female friends, in my mom and a lot of the women in my family. I feel we’re putting the pressure on ourselves – or maybe it’s external.”
She continues: “We want to be thriving in all areas of our lives at once: wanting to be a great friend, thriving in our career, being a great partner, going to the gym and being healthy. There’s this feeling of spinning all the plates at once I sometimes get. I see it in myself, and a lot of the girls around me, but then we struggle to focus on ourselves. It’s replicated in the image we picked as the album cover, where I’m reaching for the phone.”
Orla still feels trepidation at being loud, but she seems more at peace with the stuff bubbling internally. Or at least, she can make better sense of things than three or four years ago.
“It’s getting easier as I grow up to be less filtered and more blunt both in life and in my songs,” she reflects. “It’s good to challenge yourself in that way, and it speaks to why I wanted to write songs in the first place, because I didn’t feel equipped with the tools to have conversations about hard things.”
Burning the fog from her idea of selfhood, Orla’s also opened herself up to exploring her less serious side, prompted in part by her experiences with FIZZ, who decided to disband in July so everyone could focus on their solo work.
“They really taught me to be a bit more indulgent,” she enthuses. “Like our album, Secret To Life, was so silly and full of theatre, with several key changes and a general campiness in the music. All of this definitely bled into Everybody Needs A Hero, especially on ‘Sound Of Letting Go’ and ‘Late To The Party’. I didn’t feel the need to rein things in as much on this album.”
On the latter track, she enlisted her good friend, singer-songwriter Declan McKenna, to lend some vocals. It’s the first time she’s done anything like that. But following on from FIZZ, she’s learned the value of trusting people and giving them scope to do their thing.
“I’ve had slight micromanaging tendencies in the past, and it can be so damaging and unhelpful in terms of creativity,” she offers. “But with FIZZ, I just trusted those guys completely. It’s the same with Dec. I love his music and I really trusted him with the song. ‘Late To The Party’ was already written and he was very respectful of me having the final say. But by the time he came in, I was like, ‘I need fresh ears on this anyway and I trust you, so run free.’ I want to continue that theme of being a bit less precious and letting the right people in.”
Everybody Needs A Hero is out now.