A sudden power failure is rarely welcomed during a writing session, but for Jojo Orme, plunging into pitch darkness provided exactly the jolt she needed. The London musician, who records as Heartworms, was in Italy for a string of intimate shows intended to launch her new aesthetic when the lights cut out while she was on the toilet. Rather than sitting frozen by an instinctive fear of the dark, she let an unvarnished stream of consciousness direct her thoughts. The resulting sketch has now surfaced as 'Guess I’m Stuck In The Dark', a track that trades the stark edges of her earlier work for a strutting, indie noir dance rhythm.
Arriving in the wake of her 2025 debut Glutton For Punishment, the single takes Orme's macabre goth rock impulses and coats them in glitterball gloss. The premise examines psychological distortion, specifically the tricks the imagination plays when vulnerability leaves us vulnerable to our worst instincts. Orme has described the track as an effort to throw a party alongside those anxieties rather than retreating from them, leaning hard into the deceptive narratives the mind manufactures when left without light.
Back home in London, Orme took the raw idea to producer Dan Carey, who pared the arrangement back to its sharpest components. The recording process forced Orme to confront the subtext hidden within her own lyrics, which she often discovers communicating things her conscious mind had bypassed. At the time of writing, she was dealing with severe shyness, finding herself paralyzed when trying to land on concepts and uncomfortable singing in front of collaborators. Sitting trapped in the dark turned out to be an accurate parallel for an acute lack of confidence.
Working through that hesitation meant reconsidering what creative ambition actually entailed. Orme found herself wrestling with the urge to achieve excellence entirely on her own terms, sidelining external validation. A crucial part of that shift involved resisting the urge to overanalyze her state of mind. As Orme noted, looking inward too intensely simply exposes a mess, whereas staring into nothingness and letting the gloom do the work allows an artist to say whatever genuinely needs to be expressed.
Anyone assuming 'Guess I’m Stuck In The Dark' serves as an all-encompassing preview of her next LP will likely be misled. Orme has already completed recording her second album and is currently assembling its accompanying visuals, but she is quick to point out that the single is not a definitive statement of intent. The record does not follow an orderly blueprint. Orme prefers working without prearranged boundaries, happily pivoting toward a dance cut or a hip hop rhythm whenever an impulse arrives, and she expects each track on the collection to catch audiences off guard.
Instead of stylistic uniformity, the collection relies on a current of dark humour and unresolved ambiguity to bind it together. Orme refuses to settle into a single narrator across the project, choosing instead to move through the music like water so she can adapt to whatever world each arrangement establishes. That restless posture aligns with a year marked by substantial domestic upheaval, including a marriage and subsequent separation, alongside a drifting away from inherited religious tenets and long-held principles. Writing has served as her primary tool for navigating that disillusionment, giving Orme a firm footing as she prepares to take these songs out on tour alongside Interpol.
