How would you start a band? Maybe cast a spell by putting relics of each other in a small container?
At a small cafe in Deptford, over a large slice of tiramisu and coffee, London trio Mary In The Junkyard speculate about the first time they all hung out at a squat, following a protest against a Tory police bill in London a few years ago. Lead vocalist and guitarist Clari Freeman-Taylor and viola-bass player Saya Barbaglia grew up playing classical music together, and Freeman-Taylor and drummer David Addison were a part of a different musical project together. But the first time that all three came together was spellbound. “Somebody put all our hair into a jar together and made a potion,” Saya recalls. “Oh! Yeahhhh,” Clari inhales with excitement. “Maybe that’s why we started a band,” she laughs.
Whether or not the spell, whatever its intention, worked is beside the point. It’s a befitting origin story for Mary In The Junkyard, mystical and communal. Their music exists in a world where past lives of fishermen are reincarnated, a lifetime of nourishment grows from another’s sacrifice and a buried body, folk tales seep into the present and ghosts linger in the reverb. Fantasy isn't escapism, but a language to understand life’s moving anomalies.
Their debut album Role Model Hermit, out Friday, leans fully into that space between fantastic and everyday human. Expanding on the eerie folk-rock that first made them one of London's most intriguing young bands, its songs move between intimate confession and ancient fable. “I embrace the thunder and the lightning/ I will make it so hard to forget me/ I am a creature of only instinct,” Freeman-Taylor proclaims during the magnetically clattersome “New Muscles.” The album is rich with words like these, teetering between Poseidon-like decrees and primal sentiments. These songs feel both rooted and untethered, as though they've drifted in from another century before quietly revealing themselves to be about the uncertainties of your twenties, the people you love and the versions of yourself you've already left behind.
Our conversation is filled with giggles and a sense of openness, as each of their three distinct personalities reveal themselves throughout the hour. We’re not far from where they live, where they’re all in close orbit. Addison became roommates with Barbaglia in January, and Freeman-Taylor lives on the same block. There’s a studio just down the road from where they live, so ideas rarely stay unnursed for long. The line between hanging out and working seems dissolved. “Since September we’ve been a 24/7 band,” Barbaglia says simply.
Barbaglia is from London, while Addison and Freeman-Taylor are from near Hitchin, an hour outside the city. They started gigging regularly in 2022, playing two or three times a week. “We basically tried to get on every single bill, opening for every single person. We didn’t do a headline for a whole year,” Barbaglia says. When I ask them about their first gig, they all laugh warmly. “We only probably had like five serious solid songs, so we filled it out with weird songs like ‘Spaghetti Man’ and ‘The Snail Song,’” Freeman-Taylor says. She recalls how she gave an earnest explanation introducing each song of the set. It was at the Cavendish Arms, which Addison says is more of a comedy club. “A weird place.”
Despite their close creative connection as a band, they each detail their outside passions. “We’ve all got into stuff quite intensely outside of the band, which I think is very important for the band,” Clari says.
Those “things outside the band” are less distractions than extensions of the same impulse. Barbaglia trains MMA every day, often finding gyms in whichever city they’re touring through, especially during the strange comedown after shows. Freeman-Taylor does acrobatics. Addison writes a blog and builds lists of gigs and new music, mapping out the city through venues and discovery. On tour — their last was in fall 2025, opening for Wet Leg — this instinct to anchor themselves in specific rituals becomes a way of staying present.
“I found that in each city… it’s quite hard to keep a constant,” Barbaglia says. “Once you don’t have energy for sightseeing and just want to live a normal life on the road, I just find a gym in whatever place I’m in.”
Freeman-Taylor nods. “Find one thing in every city,” she says. “It gives you some kind of path.”
“We talked about that, the idea of a band, we're a performing group, but also it's sort of an arts collective thing,” Addison says. He cites Sonic Youth and Fugazi as inspiration not only musically but philosophically, bands that “create networks and support other artists.” He continues, “It's been really good as well. Where we live now, we've got lots of other friends who live with us who are also creative people, so we've been able to work a lot with them.” Among them is their friend Daisy, who directed the album and, as Addison puts it, is “a big part of the group.”
The same logic of art as a life practice rather than transitional performance flows into their shows. Freeman-Taylor explains how she measures a good night not by precision, but by connection. “I only feel a show has gone well if I’ve told jokes that make people laugh,” she laughs.
Her humor is a balance of dark bluntness and unexpected silliness. She recalls a show in San Francisco where she kept referencing Alcatraz mid-set, eventually weaving it into the lyrics of their debut single “Tuesday.”
Another time, a stage dive ended with her landing on the floor. “They were all holding cameras,” she says. “It was the Radio 6 dad section of the crowd. Two cameras each, no hands left.” She pauses, grinning. “So I just got up and said, ‘This is ‘New Muscles.’ You guys need to grow some new muscles if you can’t catch me.’” She shrugs. “It’s not that funny. My humour is quite stupid.”
Barbaglia and Addison push back on the self-effacing comment, pointing out that her dad is a comedian. He has an identical twin brother that he does an act with. “Actually if you could mention this in the interview that would be great, to give them some push. They’re called Victor and Albert,” she says sincerely. “They tour all the villages and stuff, and also sometimes towns,” she says. “When you see Clari’s mum and dad together, Clari’s stage presence just makes sense, or just Clari’s personality,” Barbaglia adds.
At one point, after I disclose that I grew up outside of Chicago, I learn that Freeman-Taylor’s ancestors are from southwest Chicago. In fact, her great, great uncle is the Giant of Illinois, Robert Pershing Wadlow. “He died quite young…he just existed and was tall,” Freeman-Taylor says. Not only is this an incredible fact, but earlier this week while listening to their wonderful debut, I decided that much of their music reminds me of Andrew Bird, who penned “Giant Of Illinois.” “I love Andrew Bird,” Freeman-Taylor agrees.
Mary In The Junkyard feels less like a project they started than something they’re still learning how to live inside. But for Freeman-Taylor and Barbaglia, that looseness grew out of disciplined training. Despite growing up in a musical household, Barbaglia says becoming a musician wasn't exactly encouraged. “My mum always told me not to become a musician,” she laughs. “She is a classical musician. It's a different thing — I wasn't going to become a classical musician.” Still, she always knew she wanted to be an artist.
“I like the beginner process,” Barbaglia says. “I like being a beginner.” For the past 12 years she's continually picked up new instruments, only to lose interest once she reaches competence. “Then I always get bored when I get to intermediate.”
She met Freeman-Taylor when they were 13. The pair spent their teenage years busking together, collecting loose change from passersby while learning how to perform in public. She explains how even though the technical stuff informs her musicianship, what she’s really developed from traditional training is unearthing a new sense. “When you're playing string instruments together in a quartet, it's not really about just playing the notes, it's about reading the other person's body, in the speed of the bow, the way the attack, the delay, everything,” she says.
“It's a lot more precise when you develop a feeling for how they are gonna feel the note, and that's what you're trying to match, that goes into a lot of different things, when you're dancing with someone at a club, or martial arts, or everything, it's like feeling the way that they're going to feel their movement. I think that's probably also what we do a lot of in the band. It's not a conscious thing, but a sensitivity.”
Freeman-Taylor describes classical training as something more restrictive, filled with tension and the dimming of personality. She remembers once she wore colorful socks and they were gaffer-taped by the conductor. “Orchestra is quite submissive,” she says. “You’re under a baton. You’re a little member of a hive doing your music.” Leaving that world, she says, felt like a quiet rebellion, an opening up rather than a rejection. “It was exciting to stop playing classical music,” she says. “It felt like something we weren’t really meant to do.”
Now, that tension between control and instinct sits at the heart of how they write.
“We don’t really know what we’re making when we start,” Freeman-Taylor says. “It just comes out.”
Barbaglia smiles. “It's a very first-hand resource rather than a secondary source.”
Freeman-Taylor laughs. “It just comes straight out like a poo.”
“Like a fart or a sneeze,” Barbaglia repeats, as if refining a theory. “There’s a tickle, then a sneeze. It’s a reaction.”
That intuition approach extends beyond music. Freeman-Taylor once wanted to be a clown, a childhood ambition that, given her habit of filling shows with jokes and stories, feels less abandoned than absorbed into the band.
“When you're a musician,” she says, “it's nice because you kind of channel anything that you're thinking about into your identity. Saya with writing, David with writing — you can just keep being a person. It's not like you have to give up everything else.”
For Freeman-Taylor, songs tend to fall into two realms. “There's two sides of songs that I write,” she says. “One is quite subjective, a story about something else. I'm talking about something but feeling through a story. It's metaphorical writing, using a story to say something and represent different things for me. Then also sometimes I just write literally about a feeling of some sort. The album has a mix of those things. There's different things from the last few years that I'm writing about.”
One of the album’s most striking moments is the closer “Mouse,” which inspired the album artwork where Freeman-Taylor is dressed as an old fisherman and a mouse sits on her shoulder. It’s a song about two old souls reuniting in a new life, while also recalling a devastating past. “Mouse I’m so sorry we drowned, the sea swallowed us and then spat us out,” Freeman-Taylor delicately sings. It’s inspired by numerous past lives she believes we all cycle through.
“'Mouse' was one of my first songs where I was really writing a story,” she says. “I heard the story in my head. I was really fascinated by the idea that people around me, like David or Saya, or different people I meet, I could have met before in another life. I find that really exciting.”
Her imagination works in wonderfully specific ways. “When I'm wearing a loose T-shirt, I always have one shoulder out for some reason, and I like imagining that that's because I was a knight and my arm got cut off in a battle.”
That fascination became the emotional core of “Mouse.” “I had this idea to write a song that's talking to someone, trying to communicate to them that I used to know them more without sounding too crazy,” she says. “I was really happy when I managed to tell that story, because it's quite a hard thing to say.”
Other songs arrived almost as if they had existed long before the band found them. “‘Thou Shalt Sprout,’ I really wanted to make that one sound like it was a tale that had existed for centuries,” Freeman-Taylor says. “Those lyrics came out really fast, in maybe half an hour, because they felt like they were already there.”
For Addison, those ideas don't only live in the lyrics. “I think there's something to do with that idea of past lives in the way that the album's produced,” he says. “A lot of songs sound like they take place in big spaces.” Some of that came from recording in a vast mock house next to the studio; the rest came from “dub style reverby production,” creating what Freeman-Taylor describes simply as “ghost sounds.”
If the album had a physical form, they imagine it as a paper-mâché ship. Something handmade and slightly precarious, built to be suspended above them on stage as a symbol of what the songs are trying to hold together. Freeman-Taylor is making a lantern to go inside it, a light shining through the structure as it moves. A glowing ship, held together loosely. Like the songs, it’s a symbol of distant past but a beacon for infinite future adventures.
Role Model Hermit is out 7/3 via AMF Records.
