Mary in the Junkyard's debut 'Role Model Hermit' is at its best when it stops holding back

The Windmill in Brixton has a habit of minting bands that go on to matter. Squid, Black Country New Road, black midi and Sorry all cut their teeth on that tiny stage. Mary in the Junkyard, three friends who lived in adjoining South London flats and played the room on repeat, arrive from the same corner with a debut that has been a long time coming.

Role Model Hermit, out July 3 on AMF, is the record those years of touring pointed at. The trio (Clari Freeman-Taylor on vocals, guitar and a small arsenal of strings, Saya Barbaglia on bass and viola, David Addison on drums) built a following on a live show they cheekily call "weepy chaos rok." By late 2024 they were NME cover stars, and they spent two months of the following year opening for Wet Leg across the States. Marina Abramovic counts herself a fan. The question a debut like this has to answer is whether the mess survives the trip to tape.

A tighter band than you might expect

Mostly, they answer it by tightening up. "Mantra III" opens the album on a note to self, Freeman-Taylor half-reassuring herself ("It is yours babe, you deserve it") before Addison's drums push in, steady and forward. "Blood" is a compact song about love gone sideways. "Seek and Destroy" rides a wiry guitar line into a portrait of self-sabotage. "New Muscles" sets one of her sharpest vocals ("I embrace the thunder and the lightning, I'm a creature of only instinct") over a groove that genuinely moves.

It is impressive, and it is also where the album quietly fights itself. The first half is built so carefully that it can feel boxed in. "Peter the Dog" and "Myrtle" are strong songs played a shade too politely, a band with real stage charisma sanding down the very parts that made them worth watching. Reviewing the record for NME, JX Soo landed on the same tension, calling the structure "more constraint than conduit" for the trio's natural charisma and settling on 3.5 out of 5. That reads about right.

The turn

Then "Crash Landing" cracks it open. Over a stuttering harmonium drone, Freeman-Taylor slides into a phrasing that recalls Sue Tompkins of Life Without Buildings, all stammer and surge, and the album stops behaving itself. From there the back half loosens its grip. Barbaglia's viola, kept on a leash earlier, finally gets to do the two things it does best: settle a song down, then rip it apart. The closer NME singles out, "Mouse," drifts off on Dirty Three-style post-rock before the strings buckle the whole arrangement into noise, the band gnawing at their own fantasy.

The most disarming moment is also the smallest. "Candelabra" is just Freeman-Taylor and a classical guitar, singing a line she wrote years before any of this ("I want you to know me through my songs, they're so much cleaner than anything I could say"), a stray giggle left in the take. No wall of sound, no viola storm. It is the plainest argument on the record that this band's best magic lives in the details they almost throw away.

The verdict

Role Model Hermit is a real debut, not a sketch, and the craft is never in doubt. What the band still has to learn is when to stop managing itself. Every time Mary in the Junkyard let an arrangement wander off the map, the album gets better, which is a strange thing to have to say about a first record this composed. They have the songs and they have the strings. Next time they should trust the chaos they named the whole project after.

The details. Mary in the Junkyard, Role Model Hermit. Released July 3, 2026 on AMF, produced by Oli Bayston and recorded in London in the summer of 2025. Members: Clari Freeman-Taylor, Saya Barbaglia, David Addison.