Music

The back room of New York City’s Heaven Can Wait doesn’t usually have a name, but on a breezy September evening, it has become the “Chaos Room.”
Red streamers, moody lighting and torn-out pieces of notebook paper with the words “I’M YOUR GIRL” scrawled across them adorn the walls. And sitting on a small side table is a portable Studebaker CD player, with a set of instructions set to its side.

“‘I’m really excited to share this project with you all, hope you love it,’” Orla Gartland reads aloud, giggling to herself as she arrives at the final sentence. “‘Please don’t take the CDs.’ God, I hope they read that part.”

Explore

Explore

See latest videos, charts and news

See latest videos, charts and news

Gartland has good reason to feel protective over the disc — on it is the entirety of her sophomore album, Everybody Needs a Hero (out Oct. 4 via New Friends). She’s invited an intimate group of her stateside fans to come listen to the project and watch her perform stripped-down versions of a few of its tracks. Before the cozy club’s doors even opened, the Irish singer-songwriter had already greeted some of the attendees queued up outside.

“They are so cute,” she says. “Someone made a badge of my face! I was like, ‘Oh my God, you really put that in your badge machine?’ I respect it.”‘

Trending on Billboard

It’s an auspicious moment for the 29-year-old: since sharing her first cover on YouTube back in the late 2000s, Gartland has spent the last decade-and-change steadily growing a dedicated online following. With a penchant for confessional lyrics speaking directly to the generational experience of growing up online, she’s developed a reputation for her DIY approach to crafting emotionally arresting pop songs.

There’s still much of that homemade spirit present on Everybody Needs a Hero — Gartland is listed as a writer and co-producer on each of the album’s 12 tracks. But the LP trades in the quieter sensibilities of a young woman singing acoustic songs in her bedroom for bold, bombastic pieces of production. Blaring guitars and clashing drums are paired, and piercing synths turn up the volume on Gartland’s alt-pop, making for a dynamic project exploring the inherent chaos of romance.

“When I was younger, I dealt with a lot of imposter syndrome, where [I] felt inferior in certain spaces. This time, I was willing to take up more space, willing to commit to things, whether it was a guitar tone or a vocal,” she explains. “I was ready to push myself, and be a bit more indulgent; now I just love the drama more and apologize less.”

Where her critically acclaimed debut album Woman on the Internet leaned into softer, more detached songs about the trials and tribulations of twenty-something life, Gartland aimed to make the entirety of her second album revolve around one of her last long-term relationships, tracking all of its complexity in a single LP. As she explains, “I wanted the good, the bad and the very ugly.”

With that approach came an understanding of what Gartland felt was missing in a lot of pop music: nuance. “I think some pop music has a tendency to dumb things down, to be honest. It’s either ‘I love you,’ or ‘I want to break up with you,’ or ‘I’m so much better without you,’” she says. “My experience is so much more mushy and conflicted than that, and I’m much more interested in that as an idea. All of these feelings can co-exist, they do not cancel each other out.”

Throughout the 12-song LP, Gartland deftly handles themes of baggage (“Late to the Party”), self-doubt (“Backseat Driver”), manic decision-making (“Three Words Away”), being the messy one in the relationship (“Little Chaos”) and much more. When constructing the tracklist, she says that she thought about the “seasons” of a relationship, from the “reluctance and excitement” of spring, all the way through to the “humbling moments of embracing the darkness” in winter.

That thematic approach marks a pointed departure from Gartland’s past work. Starting in 2009, Gartland — then a 14-year-old living Drumcondra, a Northern suburb of Dublin — started posting cover songs to YouTube. Armed with only with a guitar, a camera and her distinct voice, Gartland covered everyone from Natalie Imbruglia and Fleetwood Mac to Lorde and Charli XCX before graduating to releases of her original songs.

Where most people look back on their earliest days on the internet with utter embarrassment, Gartland feels a sense of pride. Sure, there are some old videos that make her cringe (“I really thought everyone needed to hear my Nelly Furtado cover,” she winces), but she acknowledges that her time spent as a self-described “YouTube girlie” molded her into the artist she is now.

“At one point I really resented the YouTube stigma — I was worried that I wasn’t going to be taken seriously,” she says. “But I realized that, at least with putting music online, you are the master of your own destiny. It’s not like going on The Voice or American Idol; those shows are great for the right kinds of artists, but you have so little autonomy in how you are presented. I feel very grateful, even more so in hindsight, that it’s been a slow, steady marathon, not a sprint. I feel so lucky to have been in control.”

Moving to London at age 18, Gartland began to pursue her artistry professionally in what she lovingly refers to as the “garage years” of her career. “If you think about the trope of a band practicing in their garage, that’s what that was,” she says. “You get to have your garage years before you get to play your first live show. But when you grow up on YouTube, your garage years are online and readily available for everyone to see, which can be weird!”

During that time, Gartland met and befriended Lauren Aquilina, a fellow artist with a YouTube following looking to find a career in the music business. Aquilina would go on to live with Gartland for five years while breaking into the music industry as a sought-after songwriter, working with artists including Demi Lovato, Rina Sawayama, LE SSERAFIM, TOMORROW X TOGETHER and others.

Despite their shared aspirations, Gartland says that before she began working on Everybody Needs a Hero, she never wrote with her former roommate. “I have never been more nervous to ask anyone to write a song with me, because the closeness can make it harder,” she says. “It actually turned out to be just the most effortless thing in the world — you skip the whole ‘getting acquainted’ phase, where this person just knows your humor, they know the chords that you like. You get to feel very heard.”

Orla Gartland

Finnegan Travers

As Gartland began releasing a string of singles and EPs in the mid-2010s, she decided to start a Patreon for her fans, creating a curated community where experimentation was encouraged. For the last seven years, Gartland has been releasing one demo per month to her loyal subscribers, a move she says proved to be the most beneficial collaboration of her career.

“Sometimes [the feedback from fans] is like, ‘This is great,’ and other times it’s like, ‘The second verse could be better,’” she explains. “I’m up for their critiques, because those are the people that I want to come to shows. I want them to feel like they’re a part of the process.”

While the development of an engaged fan community has been crucial to the rising singer-songwriter’s success, Gartland admits that audience growth was something she rarely found herself strategizing about. What sets her fandom apart, she says, is the importance she places on the people who already follow her.

“I have a strong sense of what the people who already listen to my music want. I care about them the most,” she explains. “If I manage to catch some passing traffic and it grows a little bit, then great. But I think my response is to listen to the audience I have.”

Gartland experienced the highs of finding viral success in 2022, when her song “Why Am I Like This?” received a prominent sync on the first season of Netflix’s Heartstopper, soundtracking an episode-closing scene in which main character Nick (Kit Connor) begins to question his sexuality. The song quickly picked up steam online, earning Gartland her first entry on a Billboard chart when the track peaked at No. 4 on the Top TV Songs chart in April 2022.

But Gartland still flinches at the idea of the immediate, viral fame that apps like TikTok can occasionally provide to artists. “I’ve had a couple friends who had big surges of attention in one way or another, and it seems like that can be really hard,” she says.

Though the singer has a steady presence on the app, she says that she tries to keep the social media facets of her job at an arm’s length. “You cannot be an independent artist and be above doing a few TikToks,” she says with a sigh. “Even though I grew up online to a degree, some of it feels like work. Some of it I really have to motivate myself to do. But, I see [TikTok] as a useful tool more than anything else.”

As she considers the role of TikTok in the modern music business, Gartland mimes a U-shape in front of her face. “I see the whole album cycle as a horseshoe. The bits that I love are at the top,” she says, pointing to the upper prongs of the invisible arc. “That’s writing, recording and being in the studio on one side, and then touring at the end once everyone’s heard it.” Her fingers then follow the horseshoe down to its lowest curve. “It’s everything in between that feels difficult — filming myself miming a song I’ve listened to one million times can get very annoying.”

After spending 2023 working with her friends Dodie, Greta Isaac and Martin Luke Brown in the glam-pop supergroup FIZZ, Gartland had a renewed taste for the dramatic. Working in a band proved to be an important learning experience for Gartland, and a welcome break from the pure ego of a solo career.

“With my own music, there’s this very direct ownership to it all. You have nothing to hide behind, and you’re thinking about yourself a lot, which feels very odd,” she explains. “There was something really fun about FIZZ — the goal was literally to just have fun and be theatrical, be camp. There was almost a cockiness to it that feels so much easier. The otherness of it made it much easier to lean in.”

While she reached one end of the horseshoe with FIZZ in 2023 — the group played multiple festivals and embarked on a 7-date U.K. tour — Gartland found herself at the other end in her solo career. Teaming up with Aquilina, her longtime co-producer Tom Stafford and FIZZ co-producer Peter Miles, Gartland began to craft her sophomore opus.

On the album’s closing, cathartic title track, Gartland arrives at something of a thesis statement. Over loud, fuzzy guitars, Gartland narrates a story of trying and failing to look brave in front of her ex, finally crumbling and asking for support as they navigate their breakup. “Honey, I don’t have much time/ My parachute has come untied/ I need you to hold me/ Stroke my hair and tell me it’ll be alright,” Gartland sings on the emotionally raw chorus.

“I’d been thinking a lot about superheroes at the time — not in the Marvel sense, but in the sense that I observe in myself and in a lot of my female friends this want to do it all,” she explains of the song. “This wanting to be a great friend to everyone, and to be good with your family, and thriving in your career and everything else. I liked the idea of the self-appointed hero; this slightly manic girl trying to do it all, and saving everyone but herself.”

As an artist who spent much of her creative life showing others what “doing it yourself” can look like, Gartland acknowledges that the “self-appointed hero” can easily serve as a stand-in for herself. But as she looks ahead in her career, the singer says she’s not interested in becoming pop music’s new champion, especially if that means signing to a major label. Thanks to the work of artists like Taylor Swift, Gartland says she doesn’t feel the pressure to sign anywhere offering her anything less than ideal terms.

“I think in a post-Taylor’s Version world, the signal-boosting of what it actually means to own your own masters, what it means to be locked into a record contract, to be shelved — all of this jargon is out there now, and it’s really good for artists,” she says. “You’re seeing it happen now with RAYE, where there are all of these artists who are really proudly independent and thriving, and I’m just really happy to see it.”

That same concept, she says, applies to the trajectory of Gartland’s future career aspirations. “I would much rather have a slow rise at a glacial, snail’s pace, as long as it’s heading in the right direction and it’s sticking around,” she offers. “If I can do it on my own terms, then that’s f–king excellent.”