From the shadows to the stage

For Josephine Orme, who performs under the moniker Heartworms, it can be a point of obsession. While we’re speaking about her plans to translate her debut album, Glutton for Punishment, for the stage, she starts talking about a clip she’d recently seen of Depeche Mode performing “Enjoy the Silence” in Berlin, decades after the track was originally released. She describes the flamboyance dripping from each of Dave Gahan’s gestures, and how even performing a song about electing not to speak – about how every action is performance – is still describing inaction in the most poetic terms possible and with the most effective, direct visual language.

It’s something she says she tries to emulate in both her own music and live show. “Simplicity is best for me,” she says, calling from her charmingly gothic home office in London. “It makes the performance more rich, which is why I just have a flag with my logo on it to set the scene. Then, you are in Heartworms world.”

“Heartworms world” is a place that’s been painstakingly built over Orme’s 26 years – from difficult years growing up in Cheltenham (she remembers herself as “a very shy child” who had “so much to say, but just never was able to say it in front of people, even family.”), to entering foster care aged 14, to busking in the street, to honing her sound while enrolled in music college.

By the time she’d finally caught the music world’s ear with her 2023 EP A Comforting Notion, her take on spiky, danceable post-punk was fully formed enough to wow critics and listeners alike. It also caught the attention of heavy hitters like St. Vincent and The Kills, both of whom brought her on tour. It’s allowed Orme to dial up the intensity she devotes to her live show, where even the simplest movements have grandiose implications. In a pop landscape where we are so tied to diaristic writing or signifiers of ‘authenticity,’ there is something almost out of time and place about the care she puts into performance, knowing how effective a tool it can be.

“To me, acting is processing real emotions, just in a different way,” she says, moving her hands theatrically as she speaks. “I say that I am an actor because of my love for creating a world and a character, for adapting for the audience.” She walks me through the process of choreography she’s devised for her live show with a friend who’s a movement coach, creating what she refers to as “rituals” to get into songs after finding it difficult to get into character while on tour in America. For instance, when Glutton for Punishment’s third single “Extraordinary Wings” begins, she’ll “stand with my hands up and breathe into the movements to make it feel like I'm taking shape.”

“Even a ring can make a difference,” she continues, referring back to the visual simplicity she aims for onstage. “I don't wear rings on stage because then it will become a focus on my hands, and I don't want that. My hands are their own…” She pauses and struggles for the word she’s looking for, before settling on “...jewellery. They're like the bones [of the performance], I don't want anything distracting from the movements or the makeup.” For all the time she’s dedicated to presentation, she knows it all goes out the window if she’s not careful with herself while going through the motions: “The only thing I'm afraid of is my voice going. That's the only fear I have when I'm on tour. That’s literally the only thing that matters. It’s my weapon.”

Following the buzz around her breakout EP and with her foot finally in the proverbial door, Orme teamed up with producer Dan Carey – known for his work with the likes of Wet Leg and Fontaines D.C. – to test how far she could stretch all that defines the world of Heartworms: the sense of whimsy, the theatrical darkness, and, perhaps most crucially, the pop instincts.

“I used to write quite a lot of indie-pop songs, because that's just how I started writing,” she says, touching on how the post-punk influence coloured so much of the work that made her so well known. “With the EP I was like, ‘Post-punk is in and I really enjoy the music. I love going to the post-punk gigs and all these cool, punky new bands are coming out,’ so I wanted to do that. But this album is actually way more me than the EP. It’s not that the EP wasn't me, but I think way more thought went behind the EP than the album.”

Taking a first-instinct-best-instinct approach, Orme took to writing new material which fell out almost effortlessly, with all songs besides “Jacked” and “Mad Catch” being written “within a week.” Perhaps surprisingly, the work not only felt more accessible, but truer to Orme’s own pop obsessions, coming in a straightforward, exceptional burst compared to her usual writing process. “Every time I write a song, it surprises me,” she says with a laugh. “And I'm like, ‘how on earth did I do that?’ I can never write anything like [what I just wrote], which is actually why most of my songs don’t sound the same. When I listen back to Glutton for Punishment, I can't believe I wrote it, and I think I'll always be like that.”

Something we return to a few times during our conversation is what a Heartworms song 'sounds like' and what warrants an idea’s entry into the carefully crafted orbit of “Heartworms world.” The historical touchpoints are pretty clear: Orme’s beloved Depeche Mode, certain shades of PJ Harvey’s back catalogue, more recent Zola Jesus projects. Yet, beyond that sonic palette, there is a lightness present throughout Glutton for Punishment – sometimes presented front and centre, more often smothered under the anxious thrum of the arrangements – that breaks new ground for Heartworms.

The palpable sense of atmosphere continues to be a throughline from the record’s first minute, as “Just to Ask a Dance” constructs a vision of a smoky room with cold synths, cutting strings, and industrial beats, swelling methodically as the track races to its finish, as if to mirror its narrative of nervously approaching a love interest on the dance floor. The big, overwhelming space it blows up and fills creates the perfect scene for Orme to panic over: “Think I'll die when you die / I’ll die a mutual sigh with / Your hand in mine”. Lead single “Jacked” takes a similar approach, wringing its hands with the repetition of “And this nothing turns black” as it works up into a frenzy of dance-punk guitar lines that swallows everything around it, encapsulating the sound of, in Orme’s estimation, “a darkness or entity which you are running away from, but it is really you that holds it.”

Though her process was organic, you can’t help but marvel over how carefully plotted out each next move feels, as if you’re watching a director storyboard a cinematic, multi-sensory experience and marking the exact second a certain shift in tone will come. At one point, Orme compares a synth sound on the EP to “a monster,” as if to conjure a sense of urgency or dread that a horror movie villain might, watching an animation play out in her head while sketching the sonic landscape that she wants to project. Even with the light streaming in through the blinds, the way she translates her terrors still holds centre-stage, from the echoing choir of phantom voices backing her up on “Warplane” or the use of negative space on “Celebrate” or the terror of modern courtship expressed through giant, squeamish synths on “Mad Catch”.

The darkness she imbues into the work “balloons” the emotion contained within, she agrees. “This is why I love the gothic, because it’s not just goth music or the aesthetics of that, but it’s also in the literature and architecture and details, or how an object can become gothic. You can think of a chair you own and how it’s not just a chair. So many people have sat in that chair and you’re personifying it and building this dark story around it. That’s what I do a lot in my lyrics, with any sort of human emotional situation. It becomes so dramatic and over the top, but it really works.”

In a few instances across the tracklist, just adding a danceable beat into the equation is the start of building a cathedral of sound – something that can house any dated, modern absurdity and make it more lifelike, if only through Orme’s filter. Even the relatively stark title track, which eventually morphs into a reprise of “Just to Ask a Dance”, can’t help but break into a beat after a certain point, revelling in the bombast.

Elsewhere, the hypnotic trip-hop groove of “Extraordinary Wings” drives the song along even as danger lurks in the background: “That’s why I cover both of my ears / Your intentions are a bird I fear.” It’s the melding of the club and the stage, where her own theatricality blows her up into a shadowy figure striking the most dramatic shapes on the wall.

“Heartworms is another side of me, enhanced,” Orme says. “I always say that Mr. Hyde is Heartworms and Dr. Jekyll is me, and Mr. Hyde does all these crazy things that Josephine wouldn't do. It makes me feel so big. When I’ve finished doing a show, I don’t feel so big anymore and I feel quite small, but I like that I have Heartworms to go to when I feel like being bigger.”

In many ways, it’s the most human party trick anyone could play to divine yourself into something superhuman, expanding your triumphs and pratfalls not only into something anyone can derive enjoyment from, playing with textures and space and intensity just to craft memorable songs, but to morph them into the most deformed, operatic version of themselves.

If you ask Orme, it’s lightning that she’s worried she one day won’t be able to catch: “I don't write every day. I sometimes can go literally half a year without writing a song, without even touching a guitar, because I'm afraid to. What matters is the balance of ‘How does my heart feel and is my head a mess?’ My heart and my head have to match to then actually focus and create something.”

In the meantime, however, she has her first full-length collection of songs to funnel herself into, and it all comes back to the extension of a hand – how she can reimagine the album now that the recordings are out in the world and out of her grip. “Now that I’m performing the songs live, I am creating something new on stage over and over again,” she says after she’s explained her process she’s devised with her movement coach friend to help her inhabit the songs more fully on the road.

“The album will stay the same, it's recorded. It's never going to change, but the live experience is a lot more important to me. There's something that people will hold onto a moment or have it replay in their head. I used to have that all the time, where I’d just obsess over something I’d seen.” Even in its simplicity, there will be plenty to focus on, from the movement to the makeup to the costume choices, including a silk strap around the arm and a “priest-y looking jacket” passed on by a friend’s girlfriend.

“The silhouette is just kind of alien,” Orme says of the jacket, speaking about it as if it’s her coat of armour when Heartworms takes over inside her and sets Josephine to the side. “You don't have the femininity here and the masculinity over there, it’s just… ghostly. I'm moving around like an essence, some kind of presence.”

Even without the visual, it’s almost like you can hear Orme’s presence dressing up for you as you listen to the precision of her voice on these songs, snapping to attention as conflict arises again, sniffing out our most human faults to ballooning them into something as unruly and alien as our dreams. She extends her hand and the world of her own design envelops you – dreaming you into something more gorgeous than this world can bear, letting the dance go on.