Heartworms is the project of South London artist Jojo Orme, who grew up in Cheltenham. She taught herself the guitar while being grounded for a year because she had a boyfriend, and her strained relationship with her mother led to her leaving home when she was 14 and entering foster care. At 16, she decided to live in the local YMCA, making money by busking and working odd jobs. Orme went on to study production and performance at Stroud College, where she started the band now known as Heartworms. After appearing on Speedy Wunderground’s Quarantine Series, Heartworms teamed up with labelhead and producer Dan Carey for the riveting 2023 EP A Comforting Notion, recently following it up with her debut full-length, Glutton for Punishment. Like any release from a band with similar origins, the record might be lumped as post-punk but easily defies this categorization. Invoking tales from her childhood, military history (a longstanding fascination), and raw feeling, Orme is a nuanced songwriter and nimble performer who conjures but isn’t afraid to break open tightly-wound song structures; to dance and wreak havoc atop the most minimal beats. The album may revolve around our personal and historic thirst for punishment, but in Heartworms’ world, aggression can sound gentle and fiercly illumating.
We caught up with Heartworms for the latest edition of our Artist Spotlight series to talk about looking back at old photos of herself, the journey to Glutton for Punishment, pushing her vocal delivery, and more.
How have you been taking in the responses to the new album on release day? Do you read all the messages at once, or do you try to just let the moment sink in?
It’s a strange one because I think I haven’t had a moment for myself. I mean, I have my fiancé and I have a dog, so it’s impossible to kind of sit in silence. But maybe for a few minutes later, after the interview, I’ll sit down and reminisce. But I was looking at old photos of myself yesterday, and the first time I ever went busking, paying my rent with busking money, playing my first open mic – 10 years ago, at 16 years old. I’ve been working pretty hard for a long time. I was teaching myself how to sing from age 12, so it’s been a long time coming.
How come you were looking at those photos? How’d they make you feel?
I guess I just wanted to make myself feel humble and grateful for what was happening, because I’m the type of person that has to be like, “How did I get here?” so I don’t feel disconnected. It’s a way of making me feel a bit grounded in my roots and why I was doing it, what drove me there, and the bad memories I had, and how I got through those memories. Looking at all these old photos and old friends, you know, the horrible clothing choices I used to have [laughs] – just being able to process all of that without feeling any shame or regret. I think it’s quite important; I’m here because of her. I didn’t do this because of where I am now, I did that because of her and how she managed to get me here. I have to give her a round of applause and appreciate her.
Is that something you do often, or was it more just the release coming up?
I do it often. I talk to my partner about it all the time. He’s so interested in my past and always listens. If I have a flashback or something or a certain song, I’m like, “Oh yes, this happened, I remember I did this, it’s just crazy how I got here.” And he always wants to know some stories, and he listens so well, so it’s nice to talk about it.
Do you have a recent flashback that came to you?
I had a job at a bar – that was a flashback – and I didn’t want to work, so I ended up skipping that job and actually going busking instead because I couldn’t stand the customer thing. It drove me insane, and I remember I got fired because I got caught busking. There’s the YMCA and crying in my room, feeling so alone, and all I could do was play the guitar, even though I knew I wasn’t good. I just knew that I had to do it every single day because it was the only thing I could do that could take me further. It’s kind of like me myself now was me all the time, making sure she did it so I could exist.
That makes me think of that striking part in ‘Smuggler’s Adventure’ where you sing, “Any change, way too strange.” It’s the kind of moment where the album zooms out to encompass all of these experiences that you’re singing about.
It’s a beautiful lyric that hits home for me as well. Change is always so ridiculously confusing and uncomfortable, but so much can happen, so much beauty. And that’s also why the song kind of changes key as well. There are so many feelings and emotions I’ve been through, and some of them I can’t tap into the same way. I guess when you’re so new and young at that time, and you feel these emotions a lot stronger, it’s crazy that now you look at it, and you’re like, “Damn, I actually kind of miss feeling that much.” All I have is the echoes of it just to talk about.
Is there one particular kind of emotion that comes to mind?
I think the unknowingness and not having an idea – you just do it. I kind of tapped into that when I wrote the album – I was just doing it, and I wasn’t thinking. ‘Smuggler’s Adventure’ was the only one I had to think about because I wanted it to be thought of perfectly and right. It was the first song I had to work on the longest, and I knew that would happen throughout my career. There would be songs where I have to take time on. But my youthful self and how I approached song – I just wrote. Even if I didn’t think – I mean, I always thought they were good, even though they weren’t. [laughs] I think that’s the kind of goal: to just think that. I’m always judging my stuff, and I’m always throwing things away and deleting them. Because I can’t stand the fact that I have this ego about it, writing new things. I want to be able to tap into that innocence and naivety about anything that I make, because it’s a feeling, an emotion, and it is a page in a diary. It is a page in a book maybe one day I want to write. These have to be there, even though you may think they’re shit – they might not be shit for someone else.
That’s when the whole opinion thing comes into it. People saying, “Oh, I don’t like your stuff anymore because it’s too approachable.” Cool! And then there are people saying, “Oh, I prefer your stuff now than I did the EP.” And it’s like, “Cool!” But then, who’s right, who’s wrong – it means don’t ever listen to what anyone thinks, even sometimes what you think, because you never know what could happen.
I understand that one of the reasons you had to be very exacting and patient with ‘Smuggler’s Adventure’ is that it’s about your fractured relationship with your mother. In a statement, you described it as “a punishment for me because I always had to go back to her.” Of course, writing this song was a way of revisiting that dynamic, but I’m assuming part of making it work was attaching a different feeling to it.
Well, it’s like when you’re running away from something – I was running away from that whole feeling. There was a kind of therapy about having to work on it for a long period of time. Being like, “I have to be careful with this, and I have to take time with it, and I have to break it apart. I have to add this.” It was hard, because I knew how much emotion had to be put into it. So it’s kind of like working with a relationship. With my mom, I have to work every day with it. I have to make it work and make it flow because I know the only person that can do that in mine and her relationship. I love her so much unconditionally, but I had to do that through the song too, you know?
In both your performances and the sonic architecture of the album, I feel like there’s a balance between being carefully controlled and cathartic. Was that something you were conscious of during the making of the album?
I knew that my voice was becoming a lot more controlled. I was understanding what I could do with my voice, and because I’m the type of person who, when I know I can push something, and I can go further, I will go further. Because there’s no limit, and if you limit yourself, you can’t grow, especially artistically. There’s always space for more, and being able to cause tension with my vocals, like slight little high-pitched softness and pushing – ‘Celebrate’ does it quite a lot. I love that feeling of the push-and-pull and the emotion and the expression of each letter in a word. I get very inspired by Prince and Michael Jackson. Michael Jackson did that so much with how he expressed words and how words became a rhythm – that was always in the back of my mind. I grew up with Michael Jackson, so he was always ingrained in me when it came to musically being something. And Prince, the kind of romantic and sensual vocals that make you feel slightly goosebumpy – like, “I shouldn’t be feeling this, this is strange.” I felt a little bit like I wasn’t supposed to be listening to Prince. [laughs] I was like, “Am I allowed to listen to this?”
‘Jacked’ is the heaviest song in there – there’s a lot of emotion and uncertainty in the structure of that song and how crazy it is. I wrote that when I was feeling that way. I can’t write the same songs all the time because I’m feeling things differently every single day. I never feel the same. I’m really happy to have this album, because even being soft and softly spoken doesn’t take away from the darkness or the heaviness. It’s just heavy in a different way, like an anchor. Not like a rock crashing on the ground – no, it’s an anchor falling softly through the water and landing on the sand. That’s what this album is to me.
You mentioned ‘Celebrate’, and as driving and kind of poppy as that song is, that explosive scream at the end says so much. It could’ve been in one of the heavier songs, but it lands with a different intensity here.
The ending was the hardest part for me. Even the verses – to be honest, the demo was completely different. I knew that the guitar line was beautiful. I wrote this guitar line, and it harmonized with the bass. There were points where I was just like, “Fuck, this needs to be a song.” And it took time to figure out how to make it perfectly balanced with the guitar lines because you didn’t want to distract from the guitar line. You didn’t want to bury it because it was so special. So I needed to find a way of singing just to complement it. So it would like [singing], “I’m a fire, I’m a cane, but I can’t have it all my way.” I love that start. It was kind of based around narcissism and how maybe I would love to think how a narcissist should speak to themselves and talk to themselves out of the way they’re acting. And how maybe they can’t, they’re trapped, but they maybe do have conversations with themselves. But it’s also an inner monologue of when I was a child, and how my mom used to think I was, and people used to think I was certain things. All these experiences were just flowing through.
“‘And in the bеat of the night”, said the beast all along/ And you hеar the clippidy-clapping coming…” Those lyrics – my mum had a scary story when we were kids called Tic Tac Talk about a three-headed monster when we were in Austria to help us – I don’t know why, this is why I question my mom sometimes. [laughs] I’m like, “Why did you tell us a scary story to calm us?” It’s probably why I’m so dark. But she would say this scary story about Tic Tac Talk, and he would come for children in the forest in Austria, where we were staying. So I used to think about that, and I used to get scared. I used to think when I was walking back from school I could hear clippity-cloppity sounds behind me, and then I made this scary story up about this woman who has half a body, and she slides on the ground and she clicks her fingernails and she goes, “Click, click, slide.” So all these scary stories were coming through, so I wanted to bring it into a song. I wanted that scream at the end – it’s like a high Kate Bush, and then a scream like what Prince would do.
I feel like a huge part of what scares us as children, and even as adults in horror movies, is the idea of unjust or unexpected punishment. Does that still ring true for you?
Yeah, I think that’s why I loved horror movies at the time. Sweeney Todd is my favorite musical – I love musicals, and I’m that type of person that just wants to know every single song. But the darkness of Sweeney Todd and the story – I became obsessed with that. Making up horror movies and horror stories is like a way of processing, but also a punishment because you couldn’t sleep at night. I still can’t sleep in the dark. I have a light on and I play a movie in the background. I have a fear of the dark – for someone who is quite dark. I’m scared I might see something, or I might hear something. Unless I’m sleeping next to my partner – sometimes I sleep in my own bed because I like to be separate and in my own room, I like that kind of balance in life. But unless I’m sleeping next to someone or in the same room as someone, I can’t sleep with the light off.
To go back a little bit, you mentioned how you taught yourself guitar while being grounded for a year. When you knew you wanted to pursue music, what did that mean for you at the time?
You listen to music when you’re in school – I mean, secondary school was tough. Everything was still systemic in the way people thought and how people were treated. It was always very difficult. I had Tumblr. [laughs] I could put my favorite song to my Tumblr account and then look through images, and I used to love that. I just love the idea of being able to sing and how singing made me feel good. There are so many artists that I would feel embarrassed to mention because I was a kid then and I liked different things, but they helped me, and I’d write their lyrics on the mirror. I’d feel motivated, and it was such a Tumblr thing to do – writing lyrics on a mirror. And then, learning your favorite songs on guitar and creating this world in your bedroom. I wasn’t allowed to leave my room. My mom would bring her family friends, and they’d have a child or daughter who would come into my room and talk to me. It was such a strange thing. A lot of kids used to self-harm and stuff. It was really sad because I was just in my room not wanting to talk to anyone, being so vulnerable.
It was quite dark, but the feeling that I got when I played guitar and when I could sing – and being grounded for a year as well, I used to write in my diary, talk to myself, look at the moon, listen to Youth Lagoon. The Year of Hibernation is one of my favorite albums of all time because of how it made me feel. My funeral song is going to be ‘17’, definitely. And then The Shins came through, too. I just knew I wanted to play on stage. I knew I wanted something, and I just had to keep getting and working at it.
Was there a time when those feelings of vulnerability turned into self-expression?
I’m gonna throw it out there – Ellie Goulding at the time was my favorite. I used to love how she sang. The song ‘Lights’ – that’s such a good song. I used to try and sing like her, so she was actually the kind of start of wanting to sing. I never really talk about it because I always kind of forget. She had that indie sleaze way of singing, I loved it. That helped me find a way of singing, and then it slowly became nasally, and then I wanted to sing like Nina Simone. I wrote my own first song when I was in the YMCA, and someone said, “Oh, it sounds like Jeff Buckley.” And then I listened to Jeff Buckley. I think because of all these artists I was listening to, wanting to try and mirror or imitate, then you start to find your own strength and your own voice. And it becomes something else.
In terms of writing, when did you start exploring your own voice?
Definitely when I started living in the YMCA and started college. It was still quite hard, though, because of how male-dominated the friendship group I had at the time was and how I felt like I couldn’t really express myself, but I was still doing it in my room, I guess. I went to college and I was able to do write-ups about my music and why I chose to do this certain thing. I loved being able to just have this freedom to express myself and be marked for it. It was like, “Write about what you did and why you did it.” And because I loved that so much, I got a student of the year award, which is one of my most treasured little awards that I keep next to me all the time. It’s not a big award; it’s a little college award, but it was a feeling of, like, how confused all the guys were. [laughs] Like, “What the fuck? Where did that come from?” Because I worked silently. I didn’t want to talk over people. I didn’t want to play the loudest in the room. I wasn’t like that. The most important thing is what you’re doing, no matter how loud or quiet you are. But the quieter you are, the easier it is to work and think and to be yourself. It was a competition for them, but not for me, and I think that’s what made it good.
Being forced to write about your music is something a lot of musicians find daunting, even if it’s making a press statement about a song.
I like to have fun with it. Because you can be like, “Oh, it’s about this and that,” but you can also give a kind of cool, smart answer or a poetic answer. For ‘Extraordinary Wings’, I actually said, “I don’t have the time of day to tell you what you want to hear.” Which is, you know, we all want to hear nothing about the war. We don’t want to hear anything about war. We don’t want to hear this and that, but I don’t have the time of day to tell you what you want to hear about that. So I don’t have the time of day to tell you what you want to hear about the actual meaning of the song because that’s what it’s about. [laughs] You don’t have to write a complete, big description of everything – there’s just so many things that you can do. I do find it daunting sometimes because I’ll be really busy, and my manager will be like, “You have to write about this,” and I’m like, “Cool.” And then I give like a one-liner, and they’re like, “Okay.” Sometimes, the shorter it is, the sweeter it is, too.
You mentioned college. I know it took some time for you to call Heartworms, which I think you formed during your time there, a solo project. When did it start to feel like not just yours to claim, but also something that represented you?
I wasn’t called Heartworms until uni – of course there were some other names, which I don’t like to talk about because they’re so bad. But I was surrounded by bands, and it was a trend to be in one, so I assumed that was a way I could make things work, calling myself a band. Even though I didn’t like the idea of it and how stressful it was having to go to rehearsal or figure anything out. I’ve been through like tens of thousands of drummers – a good drummer, who doesn’t have an ego, is hard to find. I’m not afraid to tell people what’s right and what’s wrong and what I would like from this and that, and there are people who hate being told what to do. There’s so much of that conflict I hated. I just wanted to make my music, and I wanted people to help me play it and bring it to life – that’s all I wanted. I had this vision, and I knew it was going to work, and I knew there was something I was working towards, and that I shouldn’t give up. People didn’t believe me, you know?
When I started uni, I met this guy who used to be my partner called Charlie. He was a drummer, and he was in my student halls. We became close, and he started playing drums for me, and he was the best drummer I ever had at that time. He was not up himself – it was like, “I’ve got this song and I want the drums to be like this,” and he’d do that. So that’s when Heartworms became this thing, and I called it a band because I just thought it was what you have to call it. It wasn’t allowed to be a solo project if you have a band playing with you. In my mind, that’s how it worked.
But over time, when you’re trying to find guitarists and bassists, and they start having opinions, I’m like, “Bro, come on, I just want this. I’ve written this; play it like this, but in your own way. You have that freedom to play in your own way. I’ve got you as a bassist because you play bass so well, so I want you to play it like this.” There’s so much of that, and as it started to become a solid idea, I broke up with Charlie, and all this kind of went everywhere. I then went darker, and I was like, “No, this is mine; no one can touch it. Don’t date a band member – you’ve got to really think about this.” That’s when it became a vision, a solo project for myself, towards the pandemic.
We talked about approachability, but there’s also a danceability to Glutton for Punishment that ties into how you bookend the album — the want to dance that ends up more like a need. How did that thread become important to you?
I’ve always enjoyed dancing as a form of channeling. If I felt excited as a child, I used to dance around in the living room to anything. I’d be jumping up and down, shaking my arms in the air. And then having relationships with people who were as boring as a brick and wouldn’t dance with me – I was like, “Let’s go and dance, I really want to!” I craved it, and they’re like, “No, I don’t feel like dancing.” There’s that, and also, it was to do with how shy I was and how I didn’t want to dance in front of my family. I just wanted to dance on my own, so there’s some kind of loneliness to it, but also a caressing feeling of the action of dancing, holding me. Whenever my mum left home, I would steal her CD player, put it in my bedroom, put on Fleetwood Mac or something, and dance.
When that comes into my album, it’s just something that I love to say and love to do on stage. It’s a form of self-expression for a human being who probably can’t express how they feel verbally, but can do it through movement. It can enhance a word you’re saying. I love using sign language on stage – I don’t know anyone who uses sign language that I communicate with, but I love the idea of it, because the people in the back sometimes may not hear as well, but they want to see you. Sign language is a dance to me as well. And the bookend – “All I want to do is dance, dance, dance” – it’s just a craving. That’s kind of all that happens when it comes to performing. I’m just doing that, and that’s all I want to do. I think it’s a beautiful way to end, with a comma, and go back to the beginning.
Music can be a lonely thing – even for you, these songs have existed just in your own head or in the studio for a long time. To give people the freedom to physically react to it is also to take away some of that loneliness.
It’s a space where I want people to feel they can just push themselves a little bit. I feel like sometimes dancing just actually takes away the stress. I was so stressed a few days ago and I turned on the speaker, and I turned to Tom, my partner. I was like, “I’m gonna put on some dubstep!” [laughs] We were just listening to, I don’t know, Flux Pavilion and all the old dubstep artists that I remember listening to, and just shaking every part of your body. And I felt so happy afterwards. I was like, “This is the answer!” And sometimes we forget that, you know? Sometimes we forget that we’re straining ourselves by staying still, or our posture – there’s muscles that we’re tensing that we don’t realize because of how stressed we are. But when you dance, you’re letting them go.
Is there anything else you’d like to share or comment?
I have a comment which I put quotes in: “There is no pleasing those who are adult and know it. But those who are young won’t fail to show appreciation.” That’s from Faust. I love that quote so much because if you’re an adult and you think you know everything, and there’s no more for you to know, you won’t appreciate as much as a youthful mind would – a mind that’s a sponge. People think that your mind stops taking in things because you’ve turned a certain age. No, that’s just you being aware of that. Sometimes, when you’re too aware of thinking that you’re an adult, you’re not going to appreciate the small things around you and the beauty and the pain that you need to come to terms with.
Heartworms’ Glutton for Punishment is out now via Speedy Wunderground.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.