Mary In The Junkyard flex new energy on New Muscles

London band Mary In The Junkyard have shared New Muscles, the third preview of their debut album Role Model Hermit, due 3 July on AMF. The track is a strong current indie item because it captures the band’s appeal in miniature: strange textures, emotional sharpness, live-wire arrangement ideas and a refusal to settle into one easy guitar-band formula.

Stereogum points to the clattering auxiliary percussion, eerie wordless vocals, cello, propulsive bass and half-rapped lyrical energy, all of which suggests a song that is small in length but packed with motion.

New Muscles also comes with a Luke Grieve-directed video for which Clari Freeman-Taylor and Saya Barbaglia reportedly learned Muay Thai, giving the track an unusually physical visual frame. Mary In The Junkyard have already been building momentum through earlier singles Crash Landing and Candelabra, and New Muscles pushes the album campaign forward with something that sounds whispery and direct at the same time.

The band also have a busy set of dates ahead, including in-store performances around release week, UK and European dates, and a later North American run. For indie readers, this is exactly the kind of emerging-band single worth catching early: artful without being bloodless, physical without being blunt, and strange enough to stand apart from the usual new-guitar-band conveyor belt.