Somewhere between “Deptford Beach” and a cave full of candles, mary in the junkyard’s debut album finds reality continually creeping into the phantasmagoric.

On one of the hottest afternoons of the year, the terrace outside mary in the junkyard’s neighbouring Deptford flats feels akin to the opening scene of a play. Two front doors sit neatly beside one another, periodically swinging open as another member of the band emerges, muses on an outfit choice and disappears again. Somewhere inside, flutes and violins drift through open windows. Frontwoman Clari Freeman-Taylor appears carrying a handful of little plastic mice she bought on Amazon because she thought they were cute. They are technically cat toys and make a faint rustling noise when shaken. I am handed a white one, whilst photographer Emily receives a brown one. We both pocket them without question. A few moments later, she’s gone again.

Spend enough time with mary in the junkyard, and it becomes increasingly difficult to tell where one person’s imagination ends and another’s begins.

Eventually, Freeman-Taylor, bassist and multi-instrumentalist Saya Barbaglia, and drummer David Addison gather together and lead us towards what they call “Deptford Beach”. I quickly discover this is a somewhat over-romanticised name for a patch of land beside the Thames. With the tide in, it is essentially a flooded staircase.

Their debut album, Role Model Hermit, arrives on 3rd July via AMF Records after years of growing momentum. Since releasing their Richard Russell-produced debut EP “This Old House” in May of 2024, the trio have followed their instincts wherever they lead, whether that means a music video featuring a love story with a yeti, road-testing new material before fully deciphering it, or writing songs populated by reincarnated mice and ancient folk tales. Everything they do, however, remains deeply human: friendship and vulnerability, and the tension between wanting to be seen and wanting to disappear.

As we sit down at a nearby pub, Addison orders a bitter. Barbaglia requests peppermint tea. Freeman-Taylor simply asks for “anything in a fancy looking glass.”

“The title’s from an astrological term,” Freeman-Taylor explains of Role Model Hermit. “When you’re recording it, you’re a hermit. And then when you’re playing it, you’re a role model.”

She pauses.

“Sometimes I’m like, ‘Look at me, I’m singing!’ And sometimes I’m like, ‘Stop looking! Go away!’”

“It felt like an album quite early on,” says Barbaglia. “There was momentum and we were ready to let it all out.”

“We had a really good period of writing quite intensely in January last year,” Addison recalls. “We got demos of “Crash Landing”, “Mouse”, and “Thou Shalt Sprout”. At one point, we were going to call the album Mouse, because that song just felt like such a step up for us.”

“When the singles come out, it gives me a flashback to when we were recording or writing them,” he continues. “For us, it all happened last summer. But when people start interacting with them, they feel fresh again.”

Written largely during festival season, Role Model Hermit emerged from a haze of exhilaration and exhaustion. “It was the week before Glastonbury,” Freeman-Taylor remembers. “Then it was the week after, and we were all coming down. I passed out on the sofa in the studio the next day.”

“I think it helps you to be exhausted sometimes,” says Barbaglia. “At that moment, you don’t care as much.”

“That’s when the brain is throwing out some of the craziest stuff,” Addison adds. “Hopefully the album sounds a bit like that.”

Freeman-Taylor speaks so quietly throughout our conversation that I occasionally find myself leaning forward to catch her answers. Barbaglia, meanwhile, is in almost constant motion, cycling through ballet poses and impromptu MMA moves as we stop to take photographs. Addison has spent his life enthusiastically falling down musical rabbit holes, discussing songs and cultural histories with the enthusiasm of both musician and journalist as we discuss his new music blog, Buzz Or Howl.

Despite their differences, they move through conversation like people who have spent years existing in the same imaginary world. “Our non-verbal connection is more important and more strong than our verbal connection,” Freeman-Taylor says. “When you’re in the band, you have to let go of yourself,” Barbaglia adds. “Let’s say there’s a take where I know I didn’t play my best — as a band, it’s the energy of what it becomes that’s more important than individual performance.”

That spirit of experimentation manifests in even the smallest details, like Barbaglia’s hand made instruments that appear on the record. Perhaps one of the most unique musical inventions featured is a skateboard slide guitar, played with a peri peri sauce bottle to create some of the stranger, high-pitched tones heard. “We’re all percolators of everything that we experience and see,” says Freeman-Taylor. “And we see a lot of music!”

Songs emerge through similarly unconventional means. “Mantra III”, the album’s hypnotic opener, began as an improvisation in the band’s Lewisham rehearsal space.

 “We would just play “Mantra III” as a sort of warm up,” says Addison. “To lock in with each other and feel connected.”

That same feeling of connection and trust in each other extends far beyond the rehearsal room. On their first trip to New York, where they opened for Wet Leg, they arrived with nowhere to stay and no real plan at all. “I had a sense of belief that we would find somewhere,” Barbaglia says simply. 

“Everything is fun when we do it together,” Freeman-Taylor says. “We really have each other’s backs, we can handle anything.”

By this point, songs about reincarnated mice and ancient folk tales no longer feel particularly surprising.

“I think there’s just a lot to say that’s not about me and my family and relationships,” Freeman-Taylor says.

Discussing album highlight “Thou Shalt Sprout”, she recalls attending local folk sessions, singing in two-part harmony and telling old stories. “It felt like it already existed, and I was just discovering it,” she says. “It’s actually easy to write in rhyme. The words already have links between them, and so they just fall out.”

Even Addison’s own interests seem to gravitate towards similar territory. At university, he wrote his dissertation on Gerrard Winstanley, a seventeenth-century mystic who retold religious stories as psychedelic folk tales about community and living off the land.

Reality continually creeps into the phantasmagoric.

The album’s world feels much larger than the three people sitting around the table. It is also the point at which mary in the junkyard’s sound seems to fully open out. Throughout Role Model Hermit, hushed mantras and mazy strings sit alongside distortion and moments of almost orchestral intensity, with an increasing attention to texture and atmosphere. On “Crash Landing”, for instance, the wheezing harmonium and its audible creaks, left deliberately unpolished according to Addison, add a droning, tactile quality to its sound. Even standout “New Muscles”, with its low-slung bassline, defiant yet murmured vocals and trip-hop pulse, ought to feel like a left turn, but instead feels almost like another room opening up in the same house. Every peculiar quirk still sounds unmistakably mary in the junkyard.

Throughout the afternoon, friends and collaborators surface repeatedly in conversation, but one name appears more than any other: Daisy Ayscough. A close friend and creative collaborator, her fingerprints are all over the album’s visual world, from its cover artwork and videos to its merch and social media presence. 

“Daisy’s a really big, important part of the album,” Barbaglia affirms. And by this point, her name has surfaced so often that she almost feels like a fourth member sitting at the table.

For a record titled Role Model Hermit, there is very little isolation here. What lingers instead is its whole-hearted sense of community.

As our time together draws to an end, I wonder what someone would see if they could physically step inside the world of Role Model Hermit.

Freeman-Taylor doesn’t hesitate.

“You’re in a cave, and it has loads of rugs and candles inside it. Outside, there’s an ocean and shadows of boats. It’s raining slightly, but there’s a really bright ray of light cutting through the clouds. There are shadowy figures on a nearby island, fairy creatures and little fireflies flying around.”

By now, it doesn’t feel especially surreal. Role Model Hermit may be populated by caves, fairy creatures and reincarnated mice, but its real magic lies in the belief that the most ordinary places can be extraordinary, provided you have the right people beside you.

Listen to the album…

Words – Hannah Breen