“I don’t know how I find the balance in my songwriting,” Jojo Orme, AKA Heartworms, says. “It’s just instinct. It’s kind of like how I like to design my office. I always like to make sure all the pictures are spaced certain ways, do the colours look right, is that too much to look at. It’s how I live in my normal life.” Her office, visible in the background during The Quietus’ video call is, indeed, beautifully balanced. Two desks, one for music and one for writing; a piano; books; pictures of her beloved Spitfire aircraft. Bouncing around in it is her very cute dog, Tiger, whom Orme eventually takes downstairs.
She’s here to talk about Glutton For Punishment, Heartworms’ debut album, a brief, blazing nine-tracker (“it gives just enough to taste the world,” she says). The album is masterful in its evocation of complex emotional states, while still being catchy as hell. Exploring lyrical themes from her own upbringing to the death of a pilot, from blinkered obsession to the morality of war, Heartworms creates characters drawn to discomfort, and weaves narratives pockmarked with the consequences. Gluttons for punishment, all. “In my household [as]I grew up punishment was around every corner,” she says. “I was always walking on thin ice, every day of my life as a child, as a teenager. It was so hard to live with and I needed an escape, but the title doesn’t just reflect me. It reflects people I know, and stories that need to be heard.”
Growing up in Cheltenham, Orme’s own story is one of accelerated adulthood. Leaving home at 14, entering foster care, and then living independently at 16, she had to “make it work,” as she says. “I always had a roof over my head no matter where I was. I had clothes, I had food, even if it was just pasta and a tin of tomatoes.” She made money by busking. “[That time] will always be a part of me, no matter what. I feel like it’s definitely a blessing to have experienced all of those things. As hard as they were at the time, trying to be a teenager and an adult at the same time… none of my friends understood. Having to pay rent at 16 years old. But I just knew I wanted to be a musician, and it’s always gonna be perfect writing material.”
This self-sufficiency feels present in the music itself, as well as in the lyrics. Progressing from her previous release, 2023’s A Comforting Notion – whose four tracks of chilling post-punk were leavened by the humanity in Orme’s voice – Glutton For Punishment introduces moments of danceability and light. This combination of air and claustrophobia somehow increases Heartworms’ intensity.
While she is a self-taught guitarist, Orme also draws from formal knowledge. She studied production and performance at college. “I originally wanted to be a female producer, because there’s not many in the industry. But it was so stressful, being in that production course, because it was very male-dominated. All the tutors were male. The tutors loved my work, they were so supportive because they knew how much I wanted it and how difficult it was for me.” Winning an award at the end of her course brought some serious envy from her male peers. “All the guys were like, what? What has she been doing behind our backs? But I was working hard, and I knew what I wanted to do. I wanted to learn. I didn’t want gender to stop me from doing anything. The production skills I learned helped me so much.” The care and skill of Glutton For Punishment, the textures Orme creates with synths and basslines, speak to both outsider spirit and technical nous.
Glutton For Punishment was produced by long-time collaborator Dan Carey (Kae Tempest / Black Midi / Squid / Wet Leg, and millions more), and the album is released on his Speedy Wunderground label. “We built our relationship so well that when we were in the studio it was just like butter,” she says. “It was so easy. Building up our little drum machine houses and doing new things, obsessing over guitars… it’s just always so fun. And Dan’s production on the album. So unique. It’s still really raw, he knows how to do that, but also my vocals are really different in this, compared to the EP.” Orme’s voice is also a shapeshifter within the album itself. Her da-de-das in ‘Mad Catch’ are sweet as love’s glance; while in ‘Warplane’ her tones alternatively rat-tat-tat and soar, mimicking the actions of her subject. “There’s more power. I’ve found my voice, metaphorically and physically,” she says. “I go out of tune quite a lot which I love. It’s the breaking of the voice, the emotion.”
Motifs circle, too; the closing title track interpolates the album’s second song, ‘Just To Ask A Dance’, a song “about the blurred line between being obsessed with someone and being too shy to show that you have interest in someone”. Orme reveals both songs have the same root, with the title track growing first. “‘Glutton For Punishment’, it was such a stretch, and a bit of a risk,” she says. “It was the first song I showed Dan. He listened to it, and I was anxious, so I was like ‘I’m going to make another version of this song’, which became ‘Just To Ask A Dance’. So that’s why they both have the same chorus. Like bookends.”
Orme says her past experiences – of childhood, of fractured family, of exclusion – are there in both mood and lyrics. It’s “comfort that I find from the pain, the loss, and all these things that happened to me,” she says. “I miss it, but I don’t. I can’t really explain it. Sometimes I wish I was living at home again, just so I can be shouted at, so I can end up forcing myself to do something. I need someone to do these things so I can work harder. But now my life is wonderful. I’m so relaxed, I’m like ‘what is going on’? Why can’t I just feel anger and all these other things?’ And I have to go back to my past. I have to go back. And it’s always gonna be there, because I need it. To feel human. I don’t know, I guess I just depend on it.”
But autobiography is not Orme’s only wellspring. One story, that of ‘Warplane’, Orme explains at length. “It was just a bassline, at first,” Orme explains, air-playing the bass as she does so. “[I thought] this needs to be a driving song!” She then tells of the story, about “the pilot, Hugh Gibson Gordon. He was 20 years old when he died, in a plane crash in 1940, 6 September, by an ME109 [a Messerschmitt, a German World War II fighter aircraft]. A friend of mine, he salvages parts of aircraft, and I asked him to make a badge for me. This was specifically from Gordon’s Spitfire. So it’s a story I know, and now the music video is slowly becoming that story too: about a dogfight in the sky.”
Ah, Spitfires. Orme is “obsessed” with them, as she cheerfully admits. Her A Comforting Notion EP came with a custom-made Spitfire Airfix kit, complete with Heartworms markings and insigna. The love developed from a wider passion for history (“I’ve always been interested in going to old castles, and imagining what would have happened”), via Alan Turing and codebreaking, into Spitfires themselves. She vividly remembers the first documentary she watched. “The opening scene is just clouds. With the sound of the Spitfire engine, just purring and rumbling… all of a sudden, this Spitfire protrudes from the clouds and I just fell in love with it. I fell in love with it, and I wanted to be there, I wanted to be next to it, I wanted to be the Spitfire.” Now Orme volunteers every Wednesday at the RAF Museum in Hendon, cleaning and maintaining the Spitfires, and occasionally – with permission – sitting in them.
Doesn’t the right-wing noise, the jingoism, the glorification of war surrounding Spitfires affect her? “I never think about it, to be honest,” she says. “I see it as a machine, built by human hands. And it will only be a weapon if the human is in it, to use it as a weapon. The aircraft is an innocent piece of machinery, which is beautifully built, and yes, it can be used for that, but obviously it’s not used for that any more. I’m not obsessed with guns or violence, I’m in love with it as a being, as if it has feelings, as if it is alive, a bird, a metal bird. I feel like there are people who would find it as a problem, but there are always problems with anything we believe in. I’m religious, there’s probably a problem with me being religious. I’ve come across that too. But it’s something that makes me happy. I’m using [Spitfires] in a safe way. I talk about war, but I’m anti-war. I’m very anti-war.”
One of the album’s most distinctive lines, the chant-like repetition of “I don’t wish murder, ‘cause I got no right,” in ‘Extraordinary Wings’, addresses this. “The lyrics [relate to] general war, ongoing war, previous war, and the way we think we have the right to say people should be gone. People should die. They have no right to live. We have no right, as human beings to say these things.” While some of Glutton For Punishment’s lyrics are buried in a wash of noise, or Orme’s intent is cryptic, this one, very obviously, is not: it’s made to be understood in an instant.
Her image too, formerly as militarily literal as Kate Bush in ‘Army Dreamers’ or the Manics on the back of The Holy Bible, is also “evolving”, as she says. “Kind of like I was a little child dressing up. I like to see it that way,” she laughs. “I needed a way to evolve, but not change completely. I’m still Heartworms, I’m still in love with my vision.” She describes the addition of a Vivienne Westwood parachute top, a “priest-y looking coat”, and spending more time bare-headed as part of her aesthetic evolution (“I was like… I have my hair!”).
Orme admits, too, that wearing the full-on militaria on stage is punishing. She does enjoy live performance, “when I’m actually playing the show. But before, I am having a panic attack, and after, I don’t feel real.” tQ has observed that her audience at gigs coalesces around two axes: stoic post-punk zealots and ardent young women. Orme laughs, saying she definitely agrees; then does an accurate, affectionate impersonation of each.
Defining Glutton For Punishment as an “exorcism”, Orme describes the feeling of finishing it. “When I first heard the album back, it was very hard for me to not judge it,” she says. “It’s never finished, to me, and sometimes I find myself not wanting to listen to it. I don’t want to think about it. But there was a time I just listened to it, with just pure heart, pure innocence, not thinking it was mine. And it was just wonderful. And it felt so real. And there was so much that the person wanted to say, and they did say it, in a kind of gentle, but aggressive way.”
Glutton For Punishment will be released on Speedy Wunderground on 7 February 2025
