Album Review: WE WERE JUST HERE by Just Mustard

Staccato static spins a simple guitar melody like a hadron collider on its chorus, and vocalist Katie Ball lullabies the listener with "Everything happens all the time / All around me now / I just want to make it feel good / We were just here. " You could throw a dart of hypothesis at the corkboard of conclusion to say, "Wow, Katie, 2025 sure does suck, and it seems like you're speaking on the overwhelming cultural backsliding that's returning us to our traditional sender like we're mail without proper stampage. " And you'd be talking through a one-way monitor where the song plays restlessly, forever and out, and the silence you take on is what you earn from good art.

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Since emerging with their 2018 debut Wednesday, Dundalk shoegazers Just Mustard have continued to refine their visceral brand of noise rock. Their sophomore effort Heart Under enhanced their capabilities with a sonically claustrophobic aura, crafted through lenses of grief and longing. With their third effort however, things are different. WE WERE JUST HERE sees Just Mustard embrace melody intrinsically.

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The ability of Irish shoegazers Just Mustard to weave magic via an admirable command of sonic texture has been known for some time now, given the enviably steep rise that preceded their 2022 second album 'Heart Under', for one. This time around, for its follow-up, they've turned their (still-downward) gaze somehow at once inward and out, creating a record that's - for the most part - as mentally claustrophobic as it is indebted to the rhythm, pace and environs of the night. It's best showcased in the title track, on which a pacing drum pattern competes with heavily distorted guitars and a hypnotic vocal refrain from Katie Ball to present a track pitched perfectly in the centre of a Joy Division to LCD Soundsystem spectrum, all the dark, bassy echoes of the former dancing to the latter's disco beat.

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In Just Mustard's music video for 'POLLYANNA' , Katie Ball stares into a series of security cameras, challenging the viewer with an upwards glare. She lingers like a ghost in unassuming places -- a casino, dive bar, playground, barber shop and abandoned streets and stairwells -- and everything is not as it seems. Ball spins erratically one moment and moves in slow-motion the next.

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