Orla Gartland

Irish musician Orla Gartland fuses folk rooted in singer/songwriter traditions and Irish heritage with the aesthetics of bedroom pop and indie rock. The 2012 single "Devil on My Shoulder" marked her first official release and reached the Irish streaming charts, after which she issued her second EP, Roots, in 2013. Her initial full-length project, Woman on the Internet, appeared in 2021. That same year brought the playful track "Kiss Ur Face Forever," which ventured into spiky dance-rock territory, while her band FIZZ, featuring Dodie among its members, also delivered a debut album.

Born in Dublin, Gartland began violin, fiddle, and other traditional-instrument lessons at age five, yet discovered her primary direction upon taking up guitar at twelve. She began posting cover songs online within a year and soon progressed to original material. Support slots on U.K. tours for Ryan O'Shaughnessy and Nina Nesbitt followed the 17-year-old’s debut single, "Devil on My Shoulder." Roots emerged the next year, accompanied by five headline U.K. dates, and Gartland added the track "Cast Your Stone" to the suicide-prevention benefit album Simple Things later in 2013.

After issuing her second EP, 2015’s Lonely People, she moved to London, paused songwriting briefly, and resurfaced in 2019 with the third EP Why Am I Like This? Joining Irish Women in Harmony the following year, she contributed to their charity recording of "Dreams" for Safe Ireland. Also in 2020 she released the fourth EP Freckle Season, later combining it with the prior EP to form Why Is Freckle Season Like This?, whose songs subsequently appeared in the BBC Three/Hulu series Normal People.

Recorded with producers including Tom Stafford and the Vaccines’ Pete Robertson, Gartland’s first proper album, Woman on the Internet, came out on her own New Friends label in August 2021. While preparing its successor she appeared on the 2022 Cavetown single "Fall in Love with a Girl" (originally featuring Beabadoobee) and issued an expanded one-year-anniversary edition of Woman on the Internet containing demo, acoustic, and live versions plus a SASAMI remix. The driving single "Kiss Ur Face Forever," co-written with Stafford and longtime friend Lauren Aquilina, arrived in August 2023. Three months later she joined singers/songwriters Dodie, Greta Isaac, and Martin Luke Brown to release the quartet’s debut album The Secret to Life on Decca under the name FIZZ, a livelier, collective-vocal endeavor.