Orla Gartland teams up with Declan McKenna for new single ‘Late To The Party’
PRAISE FOR Orla Gartland
“Conquering the internet might have been enough for a less ambitious artist, but for Gartland it was just the start”
“It was impossible not to immediately fall in love with Orla Gartland’s music”
“There's a refreshing frankness to the way she describes dating an emotionally-repressed man, becoming obsessed with a friend of a friend and finding solace in the sobering reality that her problems aren't unique”
“What sets Gartland apart is her honest songwriting and her contagious energy on a live stage”
“A varied and emotionally direct collection of alt-pop that mirrors the ups and downs of her journey, alluding to personal events without dissecting them to the point where they lose their wider resonance”
“Her writing captures the hard-won perspective of a life sandwiched between the online extremes of hatred and hero worship with an ironic awareness that she – like all of us – nonetheless still falls for all the snares of self-comparison”
“A headlong dive into twentysomething life”
“Joyously defiant”
ORLA GARTLAND
Everybody Needs A Hero LP
Oct 4 via New Friends
PRE-SAVE / PRE-ORDER HERE
EVERYBODY NEEDS A HERO TRACKLIST
1. Both Can Be True
2. Sound Of Letting Go
3. Little Chaos
4. Backseat Driver
5. The Hit
6. Simple
7. Late To The Party feat. Declan McKenna
8. Three Words Away
9. Kiss UR Face Forever
10. Who Am I?
11. Mine
12. Everybody Needs A Hero
‘Late To The Party’ ft Declan McKenna is out now, buy/stream it here.
Orla Gartland shares her stunning new single ‘Late to the Party’, featuring Declan McKenna. Available to stream and buy now, the track is the latest to be taken from Orla’s second studio album Everybody Needs A Hero (due Friday 4th October via New Friends) – the tracklisting for which has also now been revealed. LISTEN TO ‘LATE TO THE PARTY’ HERE + PRE-ORDER / PRE-SAVE THE LP HERE.
“‘Late To The Party’ is a big old bratty song about resenting the baggage that you inherit when you love someone and yearning for a time when we were all a blank slate,” says Orla. “I wanted a song on the record that shifted in pace a lot, something fun and loud, something indulgent. I first wrote ‘Late To The Party’ over a couple of solo sittings in my studio, mumbling out the lyrics while playing drums.
“A few months later I sent the song to Declan – for me he is one of the absolute greats, a properly timeless artist & writer. We worked on the song remotely at first, sending stems back & forth and then jumped in the studio for a day to dismantle the song & put it all back together. Dec’s parts & energy added so much to the track for me and after months of revisiting it ‘Late To The Party’ was suddenly complete.”
WATCH: ‘Late To The Party’ (Official Video)
Everybody Needs A Hero explores how she shapeshifts through the currents of a long term relationship and works out how to take up space in a postfeminist world. She explores the idea of a ‘hero’: someone to look up to, someone to rescue us from ourselves, someone we use to deflect from our own shadow self.
The album came to life between her London studio and the creative sanctuary of Middle Farm Studios in Devon. With Gartland on a constant quest to push herself as a writer and producer, she captained the ship during the writing and recording processes, with strong direction right through to the mixing and mastering. She worked with longtime collaborators Tom Stafford and Peter Miles in co-producing the album, inspired by each producers’ digital and analog approaches.
Orla this week announced a very special intimate album preview show at London’s Hoxton Hall on 3 September. The show will preview songs from Everybody Needs A Hero a month ahead of release in an intimate setting, before Orla heads around the UK for a run of acoustic album launch shows in October, and then across the Atlantic for her first full North American tour in November – tickets for which sold out in little more than a day.
Bold, brash and increasingly self-assured, Dublin-born, London-based artist and producer Orla Gartland ushered in a new chapter with ‘Little Chaos’ earlier this year. A testament to her artistic growth, burgeoning confidence and fastidious sense of independence the track is the latest milestone in this self-made talent’s journey. From career streams nudging towards a quarter of a billion, sold-out tours and festival appearances at Glastonbury and Latitude; to her Top 10 critically acclaimed self-released debut album Woman On The Internet; taking in a huge viral hit ‘Why Am I Like This’, (700 million views and nearly 400,000 TikTok creations, and counting); and through to last year joining musical forces with longtime friends dodie, Greta Isaac and Martin Luke Brown to release The Secret To Life as new band FIZZ.
Amassing a dedicated fan-base and creative community including her notable ‘Secret Demo Club’, Orla has forged an even deeper relationship with her fans as she unveils her work-in-progress tracks, some of which have gone on to feature on the upcoming second record. Her brutal honesty and pragmatic realism have always been present in her songwriting but become even more prominent when paired with the louder, more angular alternative sound Orla has embraced this time around.
Orla’s debut album Woman On The Internet charted in the top 10 of the UK Official Charts, at #3 in the Irish Album Charts and was nominated for the RTÉ Choice Music Prize Irish Album of the Year 2021. The culmination of many years honing her songwriting and production skills, the record was praised by the likes of The Observer (“This beautifully crafted debut spans pop-punk to indie rock, with knife-sharp lyrics all the way”), NME (“a hard-won celebration of perseverance and artistic freedom”) and many more.
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