One Sunday this spring, Clari Freeman-Taylor met a friend at Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery. They had a lovely time there among the historic statuary and lush foliage; after saying goodbye to her friend, Freeman-Taylor kept wandering the cemetery’s vast
478-acre grounds on her own.
“I was thinking a lot about how I would be buried, but not in a morbid way,” Freeman-Taylor, 22, recalls. “I don’t really want a grave. I’d rather just be buried in the ground, completely naked, under a tree, so that the tree could absorb me.”
After a while, she noticed that her phone had died, and she was lost. This posed a slight problem, since she had a show to play that night in Manhattan, but she trusted it would all work out. “I just walked in one direction for a long time, and then I got out,” she says. “I drew a really detailed map of New York, and I managed to get there eventually.”
Freeman-Taylor’s dreamy, head-in-the-clouds tendencies have taken Mary in the Junkyard — the band in which she sings and plays guitar alongside bass/viola dynamo Saya Barbaglia, 22, and drummer David Addison, 23 — to some fantastic places. The three longtime friends, who live in adjoining apartments in South London, are about to release one of the year’s most gorgeous full-length debuts with Role Model Hermit (out July 3), a marvel of moody atmospherics, taut rhythms, and strange tales. And their live shows, like the one they played that Sunday night to a sold-out Bowery Ballroom, are riveting. Walking into a club where Mary in the Junkyard are performing feels like stumbling across some sort of ancient rite in the woods that you might never witness again.
The morning after the Bowery show, a fundraiser gig for War Child UK 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 Abramović’s longtime partner, who was in the audience, invited the band to stay with them.
“We know that there’s some kind of weird magic that’s going to happen to us when we’re here, and you have to leave it open for that,” Freeman-Taylor says. “You can’t book somewhere, because if you book somewhere, how will the magic occur?”
Mary in the Junkyard’s out-of-time aesthetic is rooted in Freeman-Taylor’s 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 — her father has a touring comedy act with his twin brother, while her mother sings and makes documentaries — she learned every path in the nearby woods by heart.
“I used to go out for hours and hang out with myself and speak to myself. I thought that I was crazy for a while,” she says. “I still talk to trees all the time. When I see a tree that’s really beautiful, I feel like I’m looking at an extremely beautiful person. I get the butterflies.”
When she wasn’t 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. “Everyone was quite serious and nerdy, and Clari was the coolest part,” recalls Barbaglia, who grew up in London. “Clari was my friend in a village, and I was Clari’s friend in a big city. We basically hit it off straight away.”
Back home, Freeman-Taylor was listening to a lot of folk music, from Laura Marling to Leonard Cohen, and starting to write her own songs. “Candelabra,” from Mary in the Junkyard’s new album, originally appeared on an EP that she recorded in her late teens by taking a portable microphone into the woods. “I recorded at the time when all of the birds were waking up,” she says. “Beautiful backing vocals.”
Her instrument of choice at the time was a baritone ukulele (“I tried to persuade her that she should make a solo project called Clari and Her Bari,” Barbaglia says), but within a few years she’d 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.
More 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, Squid, Black Midi, and Black Country, New Road. “That ended up becoming almost like an unofficial residency, where we just opened for everyone,” Barbaglia says. “Whenever there was a space on the bill, we played there. Lots of memories of carrying too much stuff on the Tube.”
They 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. “Our sound has that,” Addison says. “It’s got the Mary aspect and the Junkyard aspect. The cleanness and beauty, and the grime and noise.” (It has led to some occasional confusion about Freeman-Taylor’s proper name, though: “There was one time I was in a crowd at a festival and someone said, ‘Are you Mary?’” she says. “And I was like, ‘No.’ And I slipped away.”)
After releasing an EP produced by XL Recordings head Richard Russell in 2024 and playing SXSW 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’s whisper-soft vocals and intricate guitar parts intertwining with Barbaglia’s shape-shifting strings and Addison’s steady backbeat to cast an irresistible spell. It’s 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. underground.
“[Bayston] was really good at managing all of our ideas and toning them down, but also making us feel free and expressive as well,” Barbaglia says. “How little can we add to make as much as we can?”
They spent last fall touring the U.S. as an opening act for Wet Leg, including a date on Rolling Stone’s Rock Tour. When they got back to the U.K. that winter, Freeman-Taylor and Barbaglia held an “intervention” to convince Addison, who’d 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.)
Lately, they’ve been working on building out their own studio space — really just a single, somewhat-soundproofed room where they’ve written most of a second album — and thinking about how to create what they call an “orb of protection” to nurture their unique bond.
It started with an actual, physical object. “We bought this big glass orb, and we were like, ‘This symbolizes the band, and we have to protect it,’” Barbaglia says. “And then two weeks later, the orb was broken. We didn’t even know that David had thrown it away.”
“Yeah,” Freeman-Taylor says in mock horror. “He just threw away the orb.”
“Not me!” Addison protests. “Our roommate.”
More recently, they’ve experimented with playing shows in the round, to create that orb-like feeling. “What we realized is that the orb is not a physical thing that you buy from the shop,” Barbaglia says.
“It’s like God,” Freeman-Taylor says. “You can’t draw it.”
Barbaglia nods: “You just know when it’s there.”
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