Words By Zach Collier
Photos: Byron Chambers // Styling: Allegra Cook
The deeper sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain. Ormella is an indie folk artist who truly understands this sentiment. She’s a cheery person, but her music is a dark, deep ocean of bitter feeling.
Ormella sat in the living room of her friend Chester Kane’s house. It’s a clean, warm living space – and near where Ormella and her band are rehearsing for their upcoming show at The Troubadour on Brompton Road. It’s London's original (and last remaining) independent live music venue from the coffee-house era, and they’re getting ready to put on a 30-minute set of original music in a stripped-down configuration. She’s stepped over to Chester’s house for better wifi so we can video chat.
Ormella’s music is best described as art-folk. It’s cinematic and theatrical, sourcing inspiration from classical and romantic traditions while formatting her art in a palatable folk/pop song structure. Her discography is reminiscent of Florence + The Machine, Damien Rice, and Lisa Hannigan. Her beautifully rich vocals are almost larger than life, delivering dark lines like “Let it go, it’s not your neck to choke” and “Damn you to hell, the devil’s gonna love you.”
Ormella sings with such effortless grandiosity that you can’t help but get swept away in her auditory postmodern Gothic fantasy.
However, Ormella herself is best described as one of the funniest people I have ever met in my life. She’s delightfully weird, fun, quick-witted, animated, expressive, and incredibly earnest and honest. We swap stories about our most embarrassing performances. She acts out a time when she paced up and down the stage, desperately trying to get everyone to clap along to an a capella number – only for no one to clap.
So she just doubled down: more aggressive eye contact. Harder clapping.
It’s sitcom-worthy humor, and she’s an excellent storyteller. I break out in laughter, and suddenly she lets out a guffaw and immediately covers her mouth in embarrassment.
“I just got a notification saying my computer is reducing noise because of my laugh,” she giggles. “Sorry if I just burst your eardrum. I often tell people I don't have any shame, which isn't true. I do have a bit.”
Joking with Ormella while preparing to discuss the heavy themes of her music brings the words of the Lebanese-American poet Kahlil Gibran to mind. In his 1923 work The Prophet, he wrote:
“Your joy is your sorrow unmasked.
And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises
Was oftentimes filled with your tears.
And how else can it be?
The deeper that sorrow carves into your being,
The more joy you can contain.
Is not the cup that holds your wine
The very cup that was burned in the potter’s oven?
And is not the lute that soothes your spirit
The very wood that was hollowed with knives?”
Once our laughter subsides and we start discussing her debut EP, STICK THE KNIFE IN, Gibran’s words prove true.
“I had like five years of trauma to wade through,” Ormella says. “So lyrically, it's pulled from my life experience and how I was feeling – which is obviously quite hateful in some of the songs. But I wasn't hearing much music that was like, I don't know, very, well… cursey. I was just like, oh, I feel like maybe I could do something here.”
Even though she jokingly describes her music as “cursey,” she isn’t joking when she references the trauma. I point out this duality in her personality. The darkness mixed with bright humor. “That’s so fair,” she replies.
“I think I kind of am like two sides of a coin in a sense. I've had this really quite horrible stuff happen to me. But I'm actually quite a happy person now. I don't like to give off bad vibes. But I think songwriting is really like my therapy.”
I soon learn that Ormella once found herself in two deeply toxic back-to-back relationships – all during the COVID lockdowns. In no specific order, she had to wade through a really deep, devastating betrayal; a partner’s substance abuse issues; a declined proposal; and the near-constant, self-defeating urge to return to the men who hurt her. We discuss her breakout indie hit, “Never’s a Promise.”
“That song, for example, is where I really had to tell myself to not go back to this person,” she explains. “Like Ormella, just step back. I think at the time of writing it, I was really trying to hold on to my anger, and let myself stay angry because I'd given him so many chances. And I kept giving him chances to turn into this guy that I had in my head, which he wasn't. So I needed to stop saying what he’d done was okay.”
After leaving one relationship, Ormella found herself in a second bad situation. “My confidence was so small after that. I ended up getting in a relationship with this guy where all of my boundaries and my bar for what was good and right for me was so low, because I was just like, oh, at least he's not cheating on me! It just got really out of hand with my wants and my needs. It was a lot.”
For any woman experiencing similar circumstances, Ormella wants you to remember one thing: stay angry.
“No, really,” she says. “Hold onto your anger, because your intuition is what can teach you to move on from something. We have those emotions as humans for a reason. Obviously it’s not good if you go too far with them. But you have these emotions to help you. A lot of the time as a woman you’re not allowed to be angry. Sometimes you lose those boundaries and standards for yourself. But if someone’s been horrible to you and it protects you, hold onto it.”
Her song “Choke” is all about reclaiming her autonomy. It’s about fighting to be free, but also learning to let go. Where “Never’s a Promise” is vividly vindictive, “Choke” is beautifully tragic. It’s a somber soundscape that paints heartache in runny, watercolor blues.
Ormella has a diploma in classical vocal performance. As we talk, she uses her journey from academic singing to folk music as a metaphor for finding herself again.
“No one’s singing alto songs on the radio, really,” she laughs. “I really love Florence + The Machine. She's got this epic, huge expanse to her higher range, you know? And I'm probably the antithesis of that. My depth is in my lower range.” For the longest time, she felt like she was the wrong fit for any sort of popular music. Some people even told her she sounded like a guy.
But over time, she found the people her voice resonated with. “People started telling me I sounded really nice when I was singing low. They liked that.” That made her pause and reconsider how she personally felt when she sang, regardless of others’ opinions. “For myself, it feels better vibrationally singing low, even though that sounds a bit wanky. Katie May, who produced the record, really helped me to nurse that delicate, intimate side of my voice that reflected what I was writing about.”
Having people believe in her was liberating, but only half the journey.
“First you got to find your voice. Then once you find it, you got to decide whether or not you like it.”
Ormella has not only found her voice, but she’s come to like it. And I like it, too. It’s hauntingly beautiful, especially on tracks like “Woman, is this it?” where her vocals swirl around you in a slow pan as she whispers devastating narratives directly into your psyche.
After a heavy talk, Ormella flips the coin and returns to positivity. “I feel as if enough time has sort of gone by that I can talk about it, so here we go,” she smiles, perking up and preparing to tell another humorous story about one of her exes.
“It was quite funny, because I used to live in this place where they sold off the old prison warden houses,” she says. “So they were like cheaper accommodation because London's expensive. So I lived there with some friends and you could literally see into the courtyard. It sounds like I’m making it up, but they could and they would see into your bedroom. There was like this walkway, and they could see every time you left the house. You're getting obscenities shouted at you, but you're saving like £400 a month, you know? I got some of the best catcalls I've ever had from that place.”
She tells me that after discovering some pretty extensive infidelity on the part of one of her partners, they started fighting in this bizarrely situated apartment. “So we're having this massive argument, and everyone could hear. And then all the prisoners were like, ‘GET HIM! GET HIM!’ So I’m having a fight, and the prisoners are cheering for me. It was unhinged.”
Long story short, she listened to the prisoners and she really gave it to him.
“Even at my darkest moment, I had to admit that was pretty funny.”