Meet Heartworms: bringing goth back from the grave (again)

Orme is the kind of star who exists only in monochrome and sparks a whole new teenage style: dead military poet, in this case. And yet, Orme is no mere spooky Wednesday cosplayer. This is a serious poet making sense of a difficult upbringing, including a period of homelessness, and finding an outlet in music.

“I never really asked people for advice,” Orme says from her home in south London. “Throughout my childhood I was always scared to ask for any advice because I might get shouted at. I learned to look after myself and be my own person without anyone’s influence. But working on this album with Dan, I asked for his advice and went out of my comfort zone.”.

The Dan in question is Dan Carey — super-producer of the London indie art-rock scene — and Glutton For Punishment is the name of the album, a tight nine-song work which is both accessible and cultish. Jacked was the big lead-off single, a song still bearing the post-punk style that she first showcased on the 2023 EP, A Comforting Notion, but elevated to a new Nine Inch Nails level in its widescreen electro-aggro.

The whole album feels like house music for a reopened 1980s goth club on the edge of town where everyone wears chainmail, and it’s cider and black or nothing. To Orme though, it’s bigger than such trite observations, a world of her own to enter. Orme was a poet first, writing down her troubled feelings, before she realised she could run a current of instrumentation through it and bring it to life. “The music is the muscle of it, and the poetry is the blood and it’s like it pumps through,” she says. “There’s been really dark moments for me but somehow the darkness was driving me to see reality, because reality has darkness. We can’t always hide away from negative things.”.

And Orme has had her fair share of those. Growing up in Cheltenham, she had a difficult relationship with her mother, and left home at 14. She ended up at the local YMCA, but views this time as being marked with good fortune, and which brought out the best in her and other people.

“This luck just kept coming. A friend would look after me, or give me a bag of clothes. I always had a fresh meal every day because people were so supportive. It’s also about how you are. “It’s all about being respectful and having good morals and respecting yourself, which gives you the opportunities that you want. What goes around comes around, that’s what I believe in.

“When I lived in the YMCA it was horrible, but the receptionists were all supportive and one gave me a guitar for free, they knew I wanted to do music.”. She was on income support but would busk to earn more. She says: “I was a child and an adult at the same time,” and there was certain youthful resilience that carried her through it; in fact she wrote her first song in the YMCA.

“It was hard, growing up in a small town and knowing nearly everyone. Everyone’s very judgmental. It was hard to constantly believe in myself, but just from writing that one song, the feeling was there. I’ve always had that feeling since I was a child that I knew something was happening. I knew I had to work towards something.”.

She eventually made it into council housing, but the cold and stasis led her down to London. She applied to universities and made it into the Royal College of Music; it was there that Heartworms first came into being, named after a Shins song. She did indie music at first but by the time the pandemic hit, she was already moving towards shadowy territory, “analysing the dark artists and bands out there…that’s where Heartworms became this dark creation”.

The truth is that this kind of dark music is rising again as a response to the tawdry kicks of the pop charts. It’s silly to think that them Young Folk are all dancing TikTok imbeciles. Quite obviously there’s going to be huge swathes who want something deeper in their lives, which doesn’t avoid negative things. This is why it’s not simply about the music, it’s about identity.

“That music gave me confidence,” Orme says. “I’ve always had a problem with how I looked and not being really feminine. I like to cover myself up, and wear quite masculine clothes. I like to be androgynous basically. And this music means I can wear military things and all black and it works for me. Everyone has their own way of feeling confident and that music opened that door.”.

Speaking of military matters, war is a theme which runs through the album, starting with the opening string-laden helicopter buzz of Just To Ask A Dance which shows off one of the best new voices in rock, packs in at least three Cure-style hooks and then blitzes the lot in distortion.

“I’ve always been interested in history,” Orme says. “I got into it when I was in a very dark place and I was on the wrong medication for something that I didn’t have. I read a book called The Code Book by Simon Singh and got into code breaking. I became obsessed with the Alan Turing story.