This show has been moved to Thekla from SXW on 6th October. Original tickets remain valid.
Irish musician Orla Gartland combines singer/songwriter folk and elements of traditional Irish music with bedroom pop sensibilities. She landed on the Irish streaming charts with her first official single, 2012’s “Devil on My Shoulder,” and followed it in 2013 with Roots, her second EP. Written during 2020, she made her full-length debut with Woman on the Internet in 2021.
Hailing from Dublin, Gartland was taught to play violin, fiddle, and other traditional instruments at the age of five, but she found her true calling when she picked up the guitar at 12. Within a year she was uploading cover songs online, eventually branching out and creating her own tracks. At 17, she had released her debut single, “Devil on My Shoulder,” landing her support slots for Ryan O’Shaughnessy and Nina Nesbitt on their respective U.K. tours. Her debut EP, Roots, surfaced the following year, and she toured the U.K. with five headline shows. Later the same year, Gartland contributed the song “Cast Your Stone” to the Simple Things album in support of suicide prevention in Ireland. After the release of her second EP, 2015’s Lonely People, Gartland relocated to London and stepped back from writing for a short period, returning in 2019 with a third EP, Why Am I Like This?. She joined Irish Women in Harmony in 2020, working with them to record a version of “Dreams” in support of Safe Ireland, a domestic abuse charity. Later the same year she released her fourth EP, Freckle Season, which she combined with her previous EP to create Why Is Freckle Season Like This. It led to placements on the BBC Three/Hulu series Normal People.
Gartland’s first proper album, Woman on the Internet, was recorded with help from producers including Tom Stafford and the Vaccines’ Pete Robertson. It arrived on her label, New Friends, in August of 2021.
