Everybody Needs a Hero (Album)

On her second album, the internet-native Irish songwriter makes a complicated relationship sound “squonky.”The Irish songwriter Orla Gartland refuses to oversimplify romance on her new album, “Everybody Needs a Hero.”“Pop music for me can be a little too black-and-white sometimes,” she said in a video interview from her home studio in London. “Lyrically, a love song or a breakup song can be really straightforward. But that’s not my experience. The line is never that straight. You know, it’s sticky and meandering. It’s a lot of, like, ‘I love you … but.’”Gartland, 29, has been her own pop cottage industry for most of her life. Raised in Dublin, she started playing Irish traditional music on fiddle when she was 5 and moved on to learn guitar, keyboard and drums. She has also mastered the crucial 21st-century skill of video self-branding, creating a constant stream of content.Gartland started posting songs to YouTube — covers and then originals — in 2009, and she released her first official single in 2012. “There’s something so naïve in my early videos,” she said. “I get very nostalgic about that era of the internet, because I do think that no one had really made a career on the internet yet.”She called that moment “really pure and good-natured, like people were putting up things because they were so alive to a community. I remember putting songs up and being absolutely fascinated by the fact that I could play a song and upload it from my bedroom in Dublin, and then someone from the Philippines could comment five minutes later.”With her debut album, “Woman on the Internet” in 2021, Gartland finally claimed credit as a producer or co-producer on her songs.Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More