mary in the junkyard – Candelabra
We covered Crash Landing (W13) back in March, when mary in the junkyard first confirmed their debut album. “Candelabra”, the second single from Role Model Hermit (out July 3 via AMF Records), is almost the opposite of that track in terms of approach. Where “Crash Landing” built on harmonium drones, trip-hop drums, and layered strings, “Candelabra” strips everything back to Clari Freeman-Taylor’s voice and a finger-picked acoustic guitar, with not much else around her.
Freeman-Taylor wrote the song when she was seventeen — one of the first sad songs she ever completed, she says, with “all of my teenage angst written into it”. She performs it solo in the accompanying video, wearing a wig (prompted, according to the band’s press copy, by a self-dye mishap). The song’s simplicity is the point. There’s a specific kind of adolescent clarity that comes before you’ve learned to complicate your own feelings, and “Candelabra” catches that. The melody doesn’t try to be more than it is.
The contrast with “Crash Landing” is deliberate and effective. mary in the junkyard — Freeman-Taylor (vocals, guitar, cello, viola, violin), Saya Barbaglia (bass, viola, violin, backing vocals), and David Addison (drums) — recorded Role Model Hermit in London during summer 2025 with producers Oli Bayston (Boxed In, Kelly Lee Owens, Alexis Taylor) and Ben Baptie (The Strokes, Young Fathers, Little Simz). The album is described as a record full of stories, memories, and past lives, and “Candelabra” sounds exactly like that: something excavated from a notebook, not assembled for release. I find the restraint more affecting for knowing what the band is capable of when they open things up.
For a debut album preview, offering something this quiet takes a certain confidence. It’s here because it earns that confidence.
Tour Dates:
North America:
- May 27 — Los Angeles, CA — Hollywood Forever Cemetery
- May 31 — New York City, NY — Bowery Ballroom
Europe:
- July 2 — Kingston, UK — Banquet Records *
- July 3 — Brighton, UK — Resident *
- July 4 — London, UK — Rough Trade East *
- July 5 — Bristol, UK — Rough Trade Bristol *
- July 6 — Nottingham, UK — Rough Trade Nottingham *
- July 7 — Liverpool, UK — Rough Trade Liverpool *
- July 8 — Leeds, UK — Vinyl Whistle *
- July 9 — Manchester, UK — HMV Manchester *
- July 10 — Glasgow, UK — Assai Glasgow *
* in-store album release tour
