Orla Gartland on making a living from music: 'From where I’m stood, the major labels make no sense'
Orla Gartland: out on the tiles. Pictures: Emily Quinn at The Workman's Club, Dublin
Fall in love and try not to lose yourself in the process. It’s this experience that 29-year-old Orla Gartland grapples with and captures magnanimously in her sophomore album .
As a piece of work, it is a metamorphosis — an album that ebbs and flows with feeling, twists and turns through the ups and downs and altogether interconnected nature of a long-term relationship. And through which she ultimately emerges self-assured.
Born and reared in Drumcondra, Dublin, Gartland packed her bags after she finished school to emigrate to London — as continues the rippling cycle that overcomes the Irish youth every few years.
Though she left the motherland younger than most, many friends and peers have followed suit, with 64,000 people leaving the country to live elsewhere in 2023 alone.
“When I go home, so many of my friends are gone,” she says.
The deep-rooted need to leave in order to succeed is almost inherent in Irish culture. Many of Gartland’s musical peers (CMAT, Fontaines DC, and Kojaque) also live and work in the UK, but their heritage flows through the lyrics.
Gartland’s debut album grappled with identity, bisexuality, codependency (after which a song is named) and that oh-so-Irish deeply embedded Catholic guilt.
The record was released in 2021 against a backdrop of ongoing covid-19 restrictions, which limited Gartland and her team’s ability to promote it with the traditional record shop signings, radio appearances, and live gigs.
“It’s so nice to be doing this in person,” Gartland muses, as she lies on the floor of The Workmans Club in Dublin, ever-obliging as the Irish Examiner’s photographer stands over her trying to get the perfect shot. “It’s nice not to be on Zoom.”
Today, as she zips from one media commitment to the next, is a world away from that first experience.
Amid many unknowns in both the music industry and the world (newly implemented Brexit restrictions were also throwing significant spanners in the works), the singer fought tooth and nail to bring that debut album tour to audiences in Ireland and across Europe.
“I have been very pensive the last few weeks about my experience of the first album,” she says.
“It was chaotic, a logistical nightmare. Then we saw the most exponential curve in ticket sales you could possibly imagine [when] people saw that I was starting the tour, so they actually had faith that I would come through.”
For many, those shows may have been their first experience of live music in months, at a time when some worried we would ever get gigs back in their traditional format.
“The energy in the room was so potent throughout the stops,” Gartland says. “I still think it was my favourite tour ever.”
Despite Gartland’s curtailed abilities when it came to promoting the record, still managed to reach number three in the Irish charts (and later, a nomination for the RTÉ Choice Music Prize Album of the Year), with Dublin record store Tower Records rallying behind the album.
“We didn’t make enough vinyl because we didn’t know how many would sell,” Gartland reflects. “Then Tower Records called me directly to say they ran out of vinyl and I was like — would you guys sell cassettes?
“They don’t usually sell cassettes, but they really wanted to help me chart. So they were like — get those cassettes to us!”
This mission to reach the charts swiftly became a family affair. The Gartland household banded together to shift stock in Dublin, while Gartland watched and waited across the pond.
“My little brother, bless him, cycled into town with this bag of cassettes. I want to cry thinking about that week. It was just so cute.”
On Friday, Gartland’s sophomore release was released into the world.
The album centres on navigating a long-term relationship and acts as an honest depiction of the ups and downs, the jealous moments, and the fight to balance radical independence with the ability to let someone in.
Fall in love and try not to lose your mind in the process? It’s harder than you think. Uniquely self-reflective, the album serves both to act as a hero and to provide respite.
At a listening party for her album in its week of release, Gartland played ‘Simple’, a new track off her album.
It’s a simple love song as the name would suggest, and in its acoustic form, it felt like poetry in motion; ‘Someone said love’s a mystery and they’re right / but I can tell you what it feels like.’
It marks a gorgeous new chapter for the artist whose early EPs focused around heartbreak. This body of work captures an independent, fiery spirit that knows who she is and accepts herself, expects her partner to do the same.
‘Is there room in your life for a little chaos?’ rings the third track, ‘I know I’ve tested your patience / me and my brave face’ calls out the closer.
Honest, reflective, and self-confident in its execution, distorted vocals soundtracked to a heavy rock guitar backing embodies a feeling of mild distortion which can be heard throughout.
Acting as a mature evolution of style and tonality from Gartland’s debut, it boasts an incredible depth of sound, complex musicality, and expansive production.
The album is a journey through stark realisations acquired through navigating a long-term relationship — and expanding on her debut’s rebellion against the inherent Catholic guilt attached to embracing freedom and liberation as a woman in the 2020s.
At 29, Gartland is part of a cohort of women who have taken that freedom and liberation and found themselves battling a new problem — the feminine urge to do it all.
This urge has been reflected in the music scene and wider cultural representations as of late.
From The Last Dinner Party’s single ‘The Feminine Urge’ to seasonally appropriate characters Lorelai and Rory, popular culture has captured the pressure (internally and externally) on women to be constant achievers. And to be able to do it all on our own.
On , the hero character is Orla herself. While writing the album, which has been self-released on her own label New Friends, she says she was inspired to take an objective look at herself and how she functions in the world, concluding that she felt an innate pressure to do and be everything all at once.
But if she might concede she doesn’t quite need to do everything on her own, self-releasing is not one area she would change.
“From where I’m stood, the music industry and particularly the major labels make no sense to me.
There seems to be a recent swell throughout the music industry which leaves traditional record labels in the past. Cabra’s Kojaque released his second full-length album last year through his label Soft Boy Records.
After being dropped by a major label in the aftermath of his debut album, his self-funded, self-conceptualised second album received critical acclaim, a Choice Music Prize nomination, and he played two sold-out shows to a rapturous Vicar Street.
Gartland is game for the ownership and control that comes with self-releasing.
Both her debut and sophomore albums have been released through her own label but she got a look behind the curtain with her recent experience of working with a record label through a project with Fizz, a band she formed with friends.
“When we did the Fizz album, it was a much more traditional experience, and there were a lot of hands on deck,” she says.
“[Self-releasing] is basically shrinking 30 people that might be assigned to your project down to, like, five,” she explains, not wanting to overly romanticise the workload.
“Everyone needs to earn their keep.”
The life of a full-time musician is one precariously balanced between hard work and pure passion, and she says self-releasing is “not for the faint of heart”.
But that defiant nature that is so prevalent in her music clearly shines through to the practical side of making a living as an artist.
“I get to be the boss, which I love because I’m a control freak,” she admits. But there is a darker side to doing it alone too.
To that end, Gartland, who began her music career making YouTube videos, posting covers and originals from her yellow-walled bedroom in Dublin — eventually growing an audience of almost 300,000 subscribers on YouTube and 172,000 followers on Instagram — knows the importance of building a community around her art, and is ever grateful to those who show-up in person and support her music.
Touring the US is a pipe dream for many musicians, but one few have the luck of pursuing due to financial and logistical obstructions.
After years of reaching fans through her social media, Gartland sold out her entire North American tour (bar one, looking at you, Vancouver) in a day.
“I haven’t toured the States before,” Gartland says in almost disbelief at the connection forged with strangers on another continent.
“Talk about expense — we just had to guess with the venue sizes,” she explains.
“It’s easy to think that you’re screaming your name into the void and no one is listening, so when people show up in Boston, and you sell a couple hundred tickets, it puts a new wind in your sails.
“Going to a show is the most you can do to show up for an artist,” she says. “It’s more than just streaming on Spotify, or buying a record.”
For those looking to show some support to one of Ireland’s homegrown heroes, Gartland will be doing a string of acoustic in-store shows in Golden Discs (Dublin, Cork, and Galway) later this month, with her first headline show at Dublin’s Olympia Theatre to come in April 2025.
It will be a chance to witness an Irish woman exploring who she is and sharing her learnings with the world. is Gartland’s reflection on navigating her twenties, the independence gained, the musical advancements garnered, and a relationship in constant navigation, but there is a lesson for all of us in knowing when to take off the superhero cape and resist the urge to do it all ourselves.
- by Orla Gartland is out now. Tickets for her Olympia Theatre show in April go on sale Monday at 10am, see ticketmaster.ie
