Dean: Just Mustard still defy categorisation

Just Mustard are a wondrous rarity: a band that play guitar music that’s slow in tempo and heavy on reverb but doesn’t sound tired or clichéd.

When considering their promising 2018 debut album, Wednesday, I previously wrote that categorising the Dundalk group as “shoegaze” – a late-1980s rock sub-genre that imbues listeners with a sense of being spaced-out – wasn’t quite on the money: “This is music for transcendence”. On their recently released third LP, We Were Just Here, Just Mustard continue to push the outer realms of their sound to savage new dimensions.

For sure, the band have always shown an affinity for the gods of 1980s and ’90s post-punk, slowcore and alternative rock – you can feel the influence of The Jesus and Mary Chain, My Bloody Valentine, Galaxie 500, Sofia Coppola’s record collection in general. Even the promo images released to accompany We Were Just Here recreates the scuffed-up iconography of Generation X.

But there’s a twist. On this album, Just Mustard have taken very direct inspiration from one of their forefathers. The very cool opportunity to support legendary band The Cure on a South America tour in 2023 provoked them to write songs they hope inspire more dancing among their crowds — songs, frontwoman Katie Ball has said, that have a “discernible melodic core”.

Press notes also claim that the band have sought to draw from “a wide spectrum of emotion and feeling” after the grief-filled second LP, Heart Under, a project that earned them more serious critical acclaim than before. This search for livelier rhythms and a more varied array of moods has inspired their most sonically ambitious set yet. ​​Nothing resembles a summertime crowd-pleaser like The Cure’s “Friday I’m in Love” or anything, but it is fascinating to witness how the band interpret what they see as more sunny and melodic into their established brutalism – the early stuff actually sounds quite quaint compared to these daring new arrangements.

Take opening track “Pollyanna”: Shane Maguire’s snappy drumming recalls the high-octane sounds of 1990s British big beat electronica. It’s an obvious move towards making their music more rapid, more danceable, to have that “discernible melodic core”; the sense of forward propulsion hints at freedom and youth.

Don’t get it twisted – We Were Just Here is not exactly sunny reinvention. As ever, there is a surreal, nightmarish quality to Just Mustard. On “Endless Deathless”, David Noonan’s strangled guitar play is bleak and oppressive, evoking the feeling of a tarry industrial environment of bricks, machinery, and rust.

Then there’s singer Katie Ball’s voice – a gothic, angelic tone, haunting like the song of the banshee, particularly when it sits low in the mix. The lyrics of We Were Just Here are not easy to make out when obscured by storms of feedback and distortion, all contributing to the warped, otherworldliness of the album. Just Mustard always sound out of time, out of space.

The writing is typically delivered in short, choppy bars. Ball’s words can be abstract to the point of leaving hardly any room for interpretation – “Maybe, sometime, always,” she repeats on “Endless Deathless”. But when they’re potent, the lyrics enhance the album’s dream-like atmosphere. Lights softly flicker off the face of a mysterious, anonymous figure on the song “Silver” (“Silver lights dancing/ Around your face/ Can’t keep the pace.”). A sense of childhood innocence permeates through “Pollyanna”, and on the surrealist “Dandelion”, Ball imagines herself as wild plant life: “I grow everywhere/ Would you still pick me?/ Throw me in your hair.”

Among the most striking tunes is the gorgeous “Somewhere”, where Ball describes finding herself unable to stand. “Crawled into a song so I can sit with you,” she yearns. These are lyrical freak-outs, particularly haunting when delivered in Ball’s spectral voice.

Then there is the real showstopper of the set: the title track. Wow, pure chaos, pure marvel! A battering synth riff brings some real retro-electro glamour, like the sound of an ’80s pop star who’s gotten lost in a tech-noir back alley. The song feels like the zenith of what the band are driving towards on We Were Just Here: the ugly-beauty of harsh aesthetics adorned with gorgeous flourishes, like sunlight hitting a dusty, long-abandoned room, illuminating its hidden architectural beauty.