\n\tThe morning after the Bowery show, a fundraiser gig for War Child UK<\/a> that they co-headlined with Irish singer-songwriter Dove Ellis, Mary in the Junkyard meet me at a downtown coffee shop. They tell me that they rarely book a hotel when they visit New York, because they know something will turn up, like the time in 2024 when they mentioned onstage that they needed a place to crash, and performance artist Marina Abramovi\u0107\u2019s longtime partner, who was in the audience, invited the band to stay with them.<\/p>\n \t\tEditor\u2019s picks<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cWe know that there\u2019s some kind of weird magic that\u2019s going to happen to us when we\u2019re here, and you have to leave it open for that,\u201d Freeman-Taylor says. \u201cYou can\u2019t book somewhere, because if you book somewhere, how will the magic occur?\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tMary in the Junkyard\u2019s out-of-time aesthetic is rooted in Freeman-Taylor\u2019s early years in Kimpton, a small village about an hour north of London whose history goes back centuries. Raised there by an environmentalist and a drama teacher, both of whom have creative pursuits of their own \u2014 her father has a touring comedy act with his twin brother, while her mother sings and makes documentaries \u2014 she learned every path in the nearby woods by heart.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cI used to go out for hours and hang out with myself and speak to myself. I thought that I was crazy for a while,\u201d she says. \u201cI still talk to trees all the time. When I see a tree that\u2019s really beautiful, I feel like I\u2019m looking at an extremely beautiful person. I get the butterflies.\u201d<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t \t\t\t\t\tMary in the Junkyard in New York, June 2026.<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tGriffin Lotz for Rolling Stone<\/p>\n \n\tWhen she wasn\u2019t falling in love with the sycamores and oaks, she played cello, earning a spot in the string-quartet camp where she met Barbaglia at age 13. \u201cEveryone was quite serious and nerdy, and Clari was the coolest part,\u201d recalls Barbaglia, who grew up in London. \u201cClari was my friend in a village, and I was Clari\u2019s friend in a big city. We basically hit it off straight away.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tBack home, Freeman-Taylor was listening to a lot of folk music, from Laura Marling to Leonard Cohen, and starting to write her own songs. \u201cCandelabra,\u201d from Mary in the Junkyard\u2019s new album, originally appeared on an EP that she recorded in her late teens by taking a portable microphone into the woods. \u201cI recorded at the time when all of the birds were waking up,\u201d she says. \u201cBeautiful backing vocals.\u201d<\/p>\n \t\tRelated Content<\/p>\n \n\tHer instrument of choice at the time was a baritone ukulele (\u201cI tried to persuade her that she should make a solo project called Clari and Her Bari,\u201d Barbaglia says), but within a few years she\u2019d grown interested in rock music and learned to play her songs on guitar. When she got a gig at a South London pub called the Cavendish Arms in 2022, she recruited Barbaglia and Addison, a friend from back home in Hertfordshire, as her bandmates.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tMore shows followed, including many nights at the Windmill, a small, nondescript pub in Brixton that has won a reputation as an incubator for some of the buzziest bands in Britain, including Sorry<\/a>, Squid, Black Midi<\/a>, and Black Country, New Road. \u201cThat ended up becoming almost like an unofficial residency, where we just opened for everyone,\u201d Barbaglia says. \u201cWhenever there was a space on the bill, we played there. Lots of memories of carrying too much stuff on the Tube.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tThey settled on the band name Mary in the Junkyard, a phrase that Freeman-Taylor suggested for its poetic qualities before realizing in time that it stood in well for the textural contrasts in their music. \u201cOur sound has that,\u201d Addison says. \u201cIt\u2019s got the Mary aspect and the Junkyard aspect. The cleanness and beauty, and the grime and noise.\u201d (It has led to some occasional confusion about Freeman-Taylor\u2019s proper name, though: \u201cThere was one time I was in a crowd at a festival and someone said, \u2018Are you Mary?\u2019\u201d she says. \u201cAnd I was like, \u2018No.\u2019 And I slipped away.\u201d)<\/p>\n<\/p>\n \n\tAfter releasing an EP produced by XL Recordings head Richard Russell in 2024 and playing SXSW<\/a> to rave reviews in the spring of 2025, they returned home to record Role Model Hermit last summer. Working with producer Oli Bayston at his studio in East London, they pared their sound down to the essentials, with Freeman-Taylor\u2019s whisper-soft vocals and intricate guitar parts intertwining with Barbaglia\u2019s shape-shifting strings and Addison\u2019s steady backbeat to cast an irresistible spell. It\u2019s a remarkable debut that feels as likely to appeal to PJ Harvey and Radiohead fans as to anyone following the hottest new sounds from the U.K.<\/a> underground.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201c[Bayston] was really good at managing all of our ideas and toning them down, but also making us feel free and expressive as well,\u201d Barbaglia says. \u201cHow little can we add to make as much as we can?\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tThey spent last fall touring the U.S. as an opening act for Wet Leg<\/a>, including a date on Rolling Stone\u2019s Rock Tour<\/a>. When they got back to the U.K. that winter, Freeman-Taylor and Barbaglia held an \u201cintervention\u201d to convince Addison, who\u2019d moved home earlier in the year after completing an English literature degree, to rejoin them in London. (The only member of the band to graduate, he wrote his dissertation on the proto-communist 17th-century writer Gerrard Winstanley, and recently launched a music blog.)\u00a0<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t \t\t\t\t\tMary in the Junkyard in New York, June 2026.<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tGriffin Lotz for Rolling Stone<\/p>\n \n\tLately, they\u2019ve been working on building out their own studio space \u2014 really just a single, somewhat-soundproofed room where they\u2019ve written most of a second album \u2014\u00a0and thinking about how to create what they call an \u201corb of protection\u201d to nurture their unique bond.<\/p>\n \n\tIt started with an actual, physical object. \u201cWe bought this big glass orb, and we were like, \u2018This symbolizes the band, and we have to protect it,\u2019\u201d Barbaglia says. \u201cAnd then two weeks later, the orb was broken. We didn\u2019t even know that David had thrown it away.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cYeah,\u201d Freeman-Taylor says in mock horror. \u201cHe just threw away the orb.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cNot me!\u201d Addison protests. \u201cOur roommate.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tMore recently, they\u2019ve experimented with playing shows in the round, to create that orb-like feeling. \u201cWhat we realized is that the orb is not a physical thing that you buy from the shop,\u201d Barbaglia says.<\/p>\n \t\tTrending Stories<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cIt\u2019s like God,\u201d Freeman-Taylor says. \u201cYou can\u2019t draw it.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tBarbaglia nods: \u201cYou just know when it\u2019s there.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"O ne Sunday this spring, Clari Freeman-Taylor met a friend at Brooklyn\u2019s Green-Wood Cemetery. They had a lovely…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":711731,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[306921,88,32352,1150,306922,216,21921],"class_list":["post-711730","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-artist-you-need-to-know","tag-entertainment","tag-indie-rock","tag-london","tag-mary-in-the-junkyard","tag-music","tag-u-k"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/711730","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=711730"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/711730\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/711731"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=711730"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=711730"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=711730"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.rollingstone.com\/wp-content\/themes\/vip\/pmc-rollingstone-2022\/assets\/public\/lazyload-fallback.gif\")
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