Gig Review: Mary in The Junkyard At Heaven

Hard-working Mary in the Junkyard reach for the stars with a brilliant coronation of a set at iconic club venue Heaven

It has been a long road for Mary in the Junkyard. I first saw them in 2023 open Wide Awake Festival; on a lineup that included early Model/Actriz, A Place to Bury Strangers and Jockstrap. Now they have – finally, three years later, their debut album – and the wait has very much been worth it. This has allowed them to hone their craft, embrace in new ideas, and function first and foremost as a live band able to pull the strings.

First band on in is Glasshouse Red Spider Mite, who are equally hardworking, incredibly talented and just look happy to be given the spotlight as big as Heaven to play at. The Spiders enlist valuable, thought-provoking questions into their set – leaning into the mythology of their namesake and encouraging people to protect rather than kill red spiders on sight out of fear. They ask the audience: are they caught in someone else’s web or weaving their own? Daunting questions for a Wednesday night.

‘Everyone Loved You’ was their EP in May and they lead with their lead single – slowcore post-rock that has earned them slots at festivals like Mutations and Left of the Dial. Their chemistry of longterm friends Alex, Benji and Ethan with Cesca in tow allows for a melancholic set that maximises on the pre-recorded set-breakers, weaving a web that draws you in, captures the feeling of the world and all its emotions. It’s a complex, rich and rewarding experience – that you can’t help but fall in love with.

Mary in the Junkyard come on next then, to album opener ‘Mantra III’. It’s appropriately bewitching – the D.I.Y. ethos of the indie band looking awed by the amount of people in Heaven – it is packed to the brim and sold out, not bad for a Wednesday night with strict I.D. only entry codes – and to go in album order straight to ‘Blood and Seek’. Fans are rewarded with a treat in tastemaker track ‘Tuesday’ as the band call back to where they came from, building on all that experience that has come since so it fits in seamlessly with the new show.

It almost looks like a circus performance at times with onstage headless yetis and creatures returning in different points and forms for a whimsical, fairytale-type structure of a set that’s akin to watching a folklore performance in motion. The paper boat is held aloft above the stage and lit up by a light that’s thrown skyward and landing with a touch of awkwardly loveable charm – cheers greeting the light’s arrival in its destination. The crowd are in good spirits, respectful and can recognise a star on the rise – their biggest headline gig has pulled a devote following and they recognise the occasion that Mary in the Junkyard have on their hands here.

‘Shall We Dance?’ asks Mary in the Junkyard partway through the set, and they ask the audience how up they are for fighting with ‘New Muscles’; the band putting the practice into the regime of stars. It is an album set as much as it is a Mary in the Junkyard set – pretty much every track from ‘Role Model Hermit’ is deployed, and this allows for the spotlight of the fight song that is spaghetti western-esque Ennio Morricone-stylised intro hums of ‘New Muscles’ make it my favourite track of the night; and indeed of the album.

The evening captures the spirit of naivety and humanism in the endearing likeability of indie folk innocence that recall to mind early, album one Wet Leg, early English Teacher, Wolf Alice or Big Thief – there are touches of Blondshell here too - with the innocence lost and the post-Brexit shadow that has influenced music and given its sense of inescapable dread ever present since.

It is a cinematic show almost akin to theatre and a stage performance immaculately stage-crafted with rich production values, starkly honest and evocative for whole worlds. It is human, it is honest – and singer Clari-Freeman-Taylor is more than capable of delivering the lyrics with a touch of class and depth that the live performance deserves, backed by viola and bass player Saya Barbaglia and drummer David Addison. The band can show that they are equipped for the bigger stages as much of anyone – updating the indie of old to reflect the band’s headline status that they are now afforded. This might be the last chance that you’ll get to see Mary in the Junkyard in a venue as small as Heaven for some time – by the time ‘Mouse’ wraps up the set; with the band enlisting perhaps predictably, a mouse-costumed character for the final show, you’re pulled back to reality from the whimsical trance that Mary in the Junkyard have you under.