Album of the Week: Just Mustard – WE WERE JUST HERE

WE WERE JUST HERE is the new album from Dundalk band Just Mustard, their third full-length release and second for indie giants Partisan Records. It’s also, by some distance, the group’s most instantly gripping and eclectic work to date.

Opening with lead single POLLYANNA, the record immediately immerses the listener in Just Mustard’s private sonic world, a dense and volatile landscape of crushing textures, careening jet-engine guitars, and insistent percussive rhythms. Hovering above it all are Katy Ball’s airy, celestial vocals, gliding gracefully over the beautiful chaos below.

Since their wider emergence with Wednesday (2018), Just Mustard have emerged as Ireland’s most accomplished contribution to the modern shoegaze and dream-pop resurgence, a revival that’s swept from TikTok to record stores in a haze of shimmering, ear-bleeding distortion. 2023’s Heart Under marked a major leap forward in production and scope, but compared to WE WERE JUST HERE it now feels more like a necessary stepping stone. This new record’s compositional ambition, textural range, and adventurous song structures make it their most confident and fully realised release to date.

ENDLESS DEATHLESS ignites with siren-like streams of high-end guitar screechery, both punctuating and complementing Ball’s inviting vocals in a dynamic reminiscent of the Kevin Shields/Belinda Butcher interplay at the heart of My Bloody Valentine. While MBV remain the most obvious touchstone, We Were Just Here proves that shoegaze possesses an uncanny ability to sound both timeless and futuristic, a guitar-based genre forever mutating and absorbing new ideas within its blissful cacophony.

Just Mustard’s strength lies in their capacity to meld reverence for the past with a restless drive toward the present and beyond. Tracks including WE WERE JUST HERE and THAT I MIGHT NOT SEE (Mazzy Star reference?) pulse and shudder with stuttering, strobing rhythms more evocative of dance music than rock, yet retain their raw, abrasive edge and in doing so conjure a kind of warped reimagining of the indie-sleaze electro aesthetic.

Throughout the record, the consistent shining light is the guitar wizardy of David Noonan and Mete Kalyoncuoglu, who coax all manner of beautiful noise from their instruments. From the chiming, string-like drones of SOMEWHERE and THE STEPS, to the incendiary sonic assaults of POLLYANNA and SILVER, and finally the dizzying, psychedelic seesawing of the cathartic, disorienting closer OUT OF HEAVEN, their work here is consistently breathtaking.

With WE WERE JUST HERE, Just Mustard have not only expanded their own ambitions but reaffirmed the enduring vitality of shoegaze as a living, shape-shifting form and its genuinely experimental spirit. WE WERE JUST HERE is a magnificent, immersive album, one to be experienced not only as sound, but as pure, primal sensation.

Just Mustard – WE WERE JUST HERE is out now on vinyl and CD.