Orla Gartland: “I want it to be bratty, goofy, funny – that’s just more me”

From YouTube covers to sold-out US tours, Orla Gartland has navigated the highs and lows of the digital era on her own terms. With her second album ‘Everybody Needs A Hero’, she’s embracing the quirks, contradictions, and newfound confidence that have shaped her artistic journey.

Words: Finlay Holden.
Photos: Finnegan Travers.

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For artists trying to make a name for themselves, it can feel like the most viable way to catch a potential listener’s ear is by pumping out short-form social content, praying for the algorithm to push things your way, and capitalising on quick, catchy hooks to forge a ‘moment’ for yourself. When Orla Gartland first started putting her creative musings out into the world, the term ‘short-form content’ had yet to be coined, but YouTube provided a platform for her early antics and allowed her to share her covers and original songs.

Cinnamon challenge, let’s plays, the rise of the vlogger. Though extremely entertaining, YouTube in 2012 was hardly a world of concentrated creative wisdom. The internet had already cultivated plenty of influential voices from the underground and taken them mainstream, but carrying a ring light around with you wasn’t exactly the norm, and talking to a camera as if it were a friend made you a bit of a weirdo. Creators were mostly just trying things out for fun, not because they could kick-start their earning potential. 

“There’s a stigma, isn’t there?” Orla poses, although it’s clear that the Irish singer-songwriter is not embarrassed by her origins in the slightest. “There was a bit of a fight for credibility. I probably had an insecurity about it when I was much younger, but everyone comes from somewhere. Coming from the internet, at least it was all self-made. I was clumsily putting up videos way before anyone should’ve heard me sing. My ‘in the garage’ years are online, but I was in control of it all.”

Perhaps the most potent aspect of her career Orla has retained control over is her relationship with her audience. Going back a decade or so, being a YouTuber meant pouring your soul into videos, forming connections with others, chatting with the recurring characters you’d find in the comments below – and fortunately, those same characters have stuck by her side ever since.

“So many people who come to my shows have known me for ten years. That is completely unheard of in this vast, brain rot, lack of attention existence, for anyone to stick by you for ten years. I’m touring the States in November. It’s the first time I’ve been there, and I’m taking a huge punt on people who knew me ten years ago to still follow me, be interested, buy a ticket and make the drive over.”

When those US tour tickets went on sale, the shows sold out in minutes. “When they all came through, it really showed me the power of the internet and growing an audience, but also the power of having been around for so long that some of those people are from pre-short form. It’s crazy, it feels empowering. I have plenty of gripes with the internet too; expecting artists to be content machines is sad for art, but when I zoom out, I am grateful for what it’s done for me and how on my own terms it is.”

Keeping things on her own terms is how Orla has stayed sane – “no one’s breathing over my shoulder; if I did make a dance trend to my songs, it would be my own choice” – and her excellent second album ‘Everybody Needs A Hero’ is arriving via her own record label, New Friends. Many of the benefits and drawbacks to existing as an independent are obvious, but for someone who loves to throw themselves into their work, the merged ethos of hard-working employee and keen manager can be hard to balance in one mind.

Recalling the creation of her debut LP, 2021’s ‘Woman on the Internet’, she says, “There was a potent mix of no set deadline, open-ended time and nothing else to do. I did a lot of meddling and tinkering around; it was not necessarily overcooked, but definitely overthought at times. The level of focus I had for it was starting to work against me because there was nothing else in my life, so I very willingly went into this feral, hyper-focused mode.”

“There was something comforting about coming back to the good ship OG and being captain again”

The follow-up record wasn’t created in as concentrated a period (“It’d be a couple of weeks of work, then nothing for four months”) due to other commitments taking priority, the most significant of which being the FIZZ project. Alongside her pals dodie, Greta Isaac and Martin Luke Brown, Orla set sail on an abstract escapade that sought to invigorate the group with newfound enthusiasm for music.

“Having the experience of a project that was not about me, my life or my feelings, that was…” she begins, struggling to adequately sum up the 18-month stay in FizzVille. “In the background of FIZZ, I was able to live the life experience that I needed to write this album. I didn’t have to farm it or mine it. We were writing collaboratively and from a more fantastical, whimsical, fun place rather than anything too heavy. It was totally necessary, without it I would’ve been scratching my head thinking of what to say.”

“That was hugely important,” she continues. “Life was happening so much that there were surplus songs and ideas, which I hadn’t had before. My first album had a song called ‘Pretending’ about being at a party, pretending to be someone that you’re not, and recording it was like – I haven’t been to a party in like a year. It was cooked in the lab of my brain, dialling into memories, but there wasn’t a huge amount of reactive inspiration. This one was very much more so.”

After getting out into the world again and remembering what it feels like to actually live your life – playing shows, making music and travelling the country with your best friends – Gartland returned to her own reality. “There was something comforting about coming back to the good ship OG and being captain again,” she phrases, ready to start sharing her own singular perspective again.

Songs came and went, studio time presented itself in bursts, and gradually Orla began to see a pattern emerging. Starting with ‘Kiss Ur Face Forever’, a series of tracks arrived that were clearly about her own relationship, and she chased this motif: “A celebration of the multitudes of feelings that you can have for one person,” as she puts it. “I never feel represented by a simple love song or a simple breakup song because my experience of life is so much more nuanced and sticky than that. It didn’t feel restrictive at all to have that specific brief; in fact, it opened it up a lot more. The idea is: I can feel this way about you on Monday, this way about you on Tuesday, and both are valid. That is life to me; the line is never straight.”

While her previous LP was a coming-of-age experience exploring identity in the internet age during a specific time of Orla’s life, ‘Everybody Needs A Hero’ is, by the nature of its own creation, less time-bound or inward-focused. “My music is still me, me, me because it’s from my perspective, but it’s about me considering myself in relation to one other specific person,” she explains, and the self-prioritisation is actually a key part of the album’s journey beyond just the lyrics.

“I’m really proud of how this album sounds,” Gartland rightfully beams. “I pushed myself a lot to commit to ideas in the production, and that confidence has come with age. Nothing in the track can apologise for itself; if you’re gonna do big drums, do big drums. If you’re gonna do a guitar riff, make it great and then turn it up loud. In my earlier work, I hear a lot of tip-toeing, a lot of dialling it back, being careful. At this point in my life, regardless of the subject matter of the song, that loud attitude always bleeds into it. I’m much better at committing to my own creative choices.”

At 29-years-old, Orla can still relate to the anxieties that she’s already explored to great effect, but is ready to be unapologetically herself in her output. “Getting towards a new decade in my life must inform my music without me thinking about it. I’ve heard a lot about the promised land of your thirties – I’m not under the impression that I’ll click my fingers and suddenly not care what anyone thinks of me, but I do feel less and less concerned with that. I’m looking forward to that continuing both musically and as a person.”

This willingness to take up space, shout from the rooftops, and embrace her own quirks has a huge influence over the appeal of the album but is not something that was easily learned: “I’m quite a goofy person but when I first moved to London I was obsessed with Laura Marling and all these beautiful stoic delicate singer-songwriters, and when I tried writing songs like that I was like, why is this not clicking? It took me years to realise I’m just not like that as a person. I’m a fucking goof; I use humour to deal with hard things, that’s just how I am. For that to bleed into the songs is the most natural thing in the world. It’s a case of me allowing myself to exist in my songs how I do in my real life.” 

“There are plenty of moments on this album – like ‘Late To The Party’, dealing with someone else’s baggage and history, taking that on as a new partner – that when you describe them to someone, they could very easily be a piano ballad if you wanted them to be. That is a heavy topic, but it’s not how I deal with them. I want it to be bratty, goofy, funny – that’s just more me.”

“If you’re gonna do big drums, do big drums. If you’re gonna do a guitar riff, make it great and then turn it up loud”

‘Late To The Party’ is Orla’s first feature track, kindly benefitting from the guest vocals of Declan McKenna, and a great example of the focus channelled into the production of this record. Loud, moody, dynamic and boasting a great chorus, of course – the work put in behind the scenes heightens the tone of whichever aspect of her mentality she is expressing in any given song.

“I want to write songs about themes that I don’t feel are represented in commercial pop music, the niche, hard to pinpoint feelings – having light and shade musically, have murky moments like the verses of ‘Late To The Party’ and building to that drop follows the through line of how these things feel to me.” The nuance is the appeal. “I’m always trying to write songs that have meat on the bones; they’re not songs you listen to once, and you go, ‘Okay, it’s got a drop in it’. I want music that is dense with meaning and detail, has enough going on that there’s value in going back and listening to it again.”

Lined up as song seven in the tracklist, ‘Late To The Party’ comes directly after the straightforward and sweet love song, ‘Simple’. Each track contradicts the last, and that’s kind of the point, which makes it even more important that you consume this project as a whole. You can point to any stop on this journey and try to surmise Orla’s feelings, but their ever-changing nature is perhaps the one true consistency. The opening cut, ‘Both Can Be True’, serves as a warning to this very point.

“It’s a statement of intent, preparing the listener,” she confirms. “It’s like a musical. I love you, I’m fully in, but also, this is hard. Those two things do not cancel each other out; all of these feelings can coexist at the same time. I love you, but I don’t want to lose myself. I love you, but I love you too much, and it scares me. I love you, but I don’t want the power of holding your entire life in my hands. Now that we’ve said that, let’s get on with it. It’s not a breakup album; it’s about figuring out how to show up for someone and make it make sense for yourself. Being able to hold onto both realities is the throughline here; the first track lays that out and says that yes, all these feelings are valid.”

Even the album title itself is one subtly built on duality. The closer and title-track is a vulnerable and humble admission of the fact that, despite chatting a lot of shit prior to this point, you need your partner to be the hero in your life. When the visual initially emerged, though, this wasn’t the first idea. “I was thinking more of the manic need to thrive in all areas of your life, be a great friend and partner, great at your job, go the gym and dress cool. This quite feminine spinning-all-the-plates feeling that I get sometimes. On the cover, I’m reaching for this phone to try to save everyone but myself. No one’s asked me to do that, but I’m still there doing it anyway.”

“I liked the cockiness of walking out to the Superman theme at my shows”

Another layer was added when a cape joined Orla’s stage attire. “I liked the cockiness of walking out to the Superman theme at my shows, the idea that you hear the album title out of context and think I’m talking about myself like, ‘Don’t worry guys, I’m here to save pop music’. It works on all levels – at first listen, there’s that hands-on-hips cockiness that I have on stage, but actually, the song is soft and sweet. It’s a fun visual world to lean into.”

Crafting an LP that fits all these stimulating, ambitious ideas without shattering completely is a feat in itself, and one that could not possibly be entirely accomplished by just one person. “That’s where having other people is really important,” she acknowledges. “I still have plenty of dependencies and people that I trust to be honest with me when the hyperfixation gets too real. It’s not the same as FIZZ where there are other people on the same level as you as ‘the artist’. You get to be the boss and lead the way, but also lean on others for a bit of perspective.”

Pulling on existing collaborators to form an in-house expert team, Tom Stafford (‘Woman On The Internet’) and Peter Miles (‘The Secret To Life’) joined forces in “an arranged marriage” as Orla’s co-producers on ‘Everybody Needs A Hero’. While some artists choose to hop between producers for fresh inspiration, like changing a variable in an experiment, the all-encompassing openness of this record demanded a more familiar environment – musicians with established relationships, the freedom of a home demo process, and a return to Devon’s Middle Farm Studios.

“In a world where I worked with total strangers, I don’t think I would’ve felt comfortable becoming vulnerable enough to write a song like ‘Mine’. I’m not a completely walls-up person, but I do use songwriting as a way of being more open than I naturally am in real life. It’s a side-quest life mission of mine to break down those walls eventually, but right now, I still need spaces that I feel safe in to get on that level. If it was with strangers or in a new studio I would hopefully have still made a good album, but it wouldn’t have been this one.”

“I choose to work with people that I could cry in front of,” she declares. “In one way, this is my job, and making an album is my work, but it’s not really; it’s so emotional and full on. If you’re trying to pour your heart into something, it doesn’t feel like work in that moment at all. Everyone that played on it is someone that I would feel fine to cry around. I actually didn’t cry because being around people that you can get on that level with makes a huge difference and helped me open up more. That setting was pretty essential to getting this all out of me.”

After conversing with the voices in her head (‘Backseat Driver’) and questioning how her identity can stand strong without submitting to someone else’s (‘Who Am I?’), you might think that Orla has figured it all now, right? While ‘Everybody Needs A Hero’ is an unabashed translation of her outlook and stands assertive in its bold creative choices, the artist behind it remains “literally just a girl”.

“It’s confident in its delivery, but, of course, there are plenty of insecurities because that’s just what music is for me,” she summarises. “There’s nothing interesting about listening to an album from someone who claims to be on solid footing with every aspect of their life, that’s so unrelatable. A little bit of figuring things out is essential; it’s almost the driving force. It’s not just with work. I really look forward to being my parents’ age and having albums I can look back on and think, ah, that’s what I was coming to terms with at that time; when I got to album four I was thinking about this, album five was the mortgage… That incompleteness is essential not only to my music but the music I like. There has to be a curiosity, a wondering, a learning, a question – otherwise, what’s the point?”

Taken from the November 2024 issue of Dork. Orla Gartland’s album ‘Everybody Needs A Hero’ is out now.