If you’ve listened to mary in the junkyard and had a thought that the music was made with some sort of witchy alchemy, you might feel validated by the orb. The orb, as the trio’s drummer David Addison explains, is a sensation between him and his bandmates/roommates Clari Freeman-Taylor and Saya Barbaglia that represents their friendship and artistic partnership. “Sometimes on stage we'll have an actual orb, like a lamp, in a sphere, and sometimes we'll just, like, talk about feeling it,” he says from an early-evening darkened kitchen in Hitchen, England. The orb takes to the road on a four month tour across North America and Europe for the trio’s debut album Role Model Hermit, a collection of songs that sound like a mystical ritual in the woods. If the orb is a feeling, the sound is violas filtered through effects pedals, melodies that lift and haunt, and percussion like a quickening heartbeat.
Addison and Freeman-Taylor started playing music together in a band with some friends from school, and after practice, they would jam out the folky songs that she had been working on. Freeman-Taylor knew Barbaglia from a summer camp school, and the three of them began playing together and experimenting as a band. Things started to get official when Freeman-Taylor landed a gig in London for the folk EP she’d put out, and as they kept getting booked, the “angular, weird stuff,” as Addison puts it, started to develop naturally. The first light of the orb, Addison says, came out of the friends listening to each other and locking in with each one’s offering. “Before this album, we started playing with a lot more, sort of, electronic stuff, especially with Saya's viola,” David says. “She went from using it quite traditionally to then putting it through pedals, which kind of gives some of the weird like, strange, siren-y noises that are on the album. I think it's all been quite instinctive, just enjoying playing together, and the songs have just grown out of that.”
If you had to pick another piece of culture to describe the aesthetic of Role Model Hermit, the tv show Yellowjackets might be the best fit, with its setting in the woods, mysterious symbols, and floral, deer antler headgear rituals. The standout single from the album “New Muscles” in particular, would not be out of place in a scene. It’s got this percussive strut layered with a moon howl and mist-evoking violin and Freeman-Taylor’s determined talk-singing chorus “I’ve been getting up and getting down/working up and getting down/I’ve got new muscles all over my back.”
The song has become an inner strength banger for fans even though it began as the sort of ribbing that one friend would give to another for going to the gym for the first time. “When we did our UK tour, we'd go to the merch desk after the show, and quite often we'd have people come and say similar things about it being an inspirational song for them, or about inner strength,” Addison says, “As much as the initial thing was Clari sort of riffing about me having gone to the gym for the first time, the longer you live with a song, the more you realize the emotional layers of it, and I think that idea of inner strength always in there. I think it's amazing to have these songs. They really take on a second life when people can live in them.”
This tour is not the band’s first stop in the US. Last time, they were opening for Wet Leg and getting to experience and learn from the headlining band about playing massive venues with intricate light set ups. It’s the touring and recording life that gave the album its title; the contradiction of a musician’s life. “Being an artist, and having to do both. You have to have that time where you are a hermit,” Addison says. “For us, being in the studio together in that real enclosed environment. But then, yeah, being a role model, going out, sharing it with the world, performing it.” How does it feel to be doing it as the headliner this time? “It's exciting, a bit scary,” Addison says. But maybe when you’re part of the orb, scary doesn’t have to seem so daunting.
