Just Mustard
We Were Just Here
PARTISAN

In the span of eight years, Ireland’s Just Mustard have released three albums of haunting noise rock, each one a mutation of the one that came before, and each time breaking through a new dimension of sound. Their 2018 debut Wednesday rocketed their lo-fi post-punk to a global audience thanks in part to a tour with fellow countrymen Fontaines D.C., and the gothic whimsy of 2022’s shoegaze-y Heart Under shot through the heart of The Cure’s Robert Smith, who picked the band to be an opener for their South American stadium tour. Now on their third album, Just Mustard throw stones at their shoegaze glass castle with We Were Just Here, a heavy-padded experiment in hypnosis that manages to channel a sense of euphoric mania and self-delusion.

Like a live wire, We Were Just Here sees the band grasping for something to hold onto amid a rush of adrenaline. What seems to stick is their compulsive use of electronic engineering, with the opening track and muse for the project, “Pollyanna,” orchestrating a song out of a personality type known for obsessive optimism. Vocalist Katie Ball loops ecstasy in a chromatic merry-go-round of dark, flickering sonics while percussionist Shane Maguire fills the empty space with rippling In Rainbows homage. And with the help of producer David Wrench, Ball’s choruses lift sharply off the warped textures without sacrificing momentum. The spiraling second track, “Endless Deathless,” feels like going through a tunnel in a high-speed chase, and it achieves a special kind of compositional scene-setting familiar to Fontaines’ Romance LP.

There’s an eeriness to all the technicolor flashing, as though the obsession found in Pollyanna’s optimism has grown to become suffocating. The album operates around a whirring illusion of euphoric fantasy while the music creates an impending sense of doom, which overshadows the quintet’s previous lower-vibration albums. But the harsh light exposes what the band leaves in the shadows, as most of the back half of the record focuses on the comedown of the abrasive first 30 minutes. Hypnotic and propulsive, the entirety of We Were Just Here is a menagerie of shiny things, for which Ball is the light that we look through to see the variety of changing textures. Her vocals are laced with Rob Clarke’s thrumming bass, and the echoing waves of David Noonan and Mete Kalyoncuoğlu’s guitars weave together chilling siren-like sounds to match the tone of Ball’s ethereal trills.

Just Mustard continue to cement a bursting, atmospheric sound all their own, as We Were Just Here sees them pivot into a riveting realm of experimental rock that pushes and pulls between the bright mechanics of pedals and mixers while letting the angelic hum of guitar noise speak to both the good and bad—and, more than either, the complication—of radical optimism.

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