Due for release 24th October 2025 via Partisan Records
CD / Std Black LP / Indies Purple LP / Ltd Dinked Edition LP
Dinked Edition No. 366 features :
Purple with black & white splatter vinyl
11” x 17” signed poster
A4 sticker sheet
Limited pressing of 800
On WE WERE JUST HERE, Dundalk, Ireland five-piece Just Mustard surge out of the shadows from the submerged world of Heart Under with a sound that leans toward light and euphoria. Their signature elements remain intact - warped guitars, cavernous low ends, twisted sound design - but this time the noise is channeled into something warmer and more melodic. Inspired by club spaces and physical joy, the songs strive for immediacy and feeling. Katie Ball’s vocals rise higher in the mix, capturing a conflicted pursuit of happiness that she describes as “trying to feel euphoric, but at a cost.” Produced by the band and mixed by David Wrench (FKA Twigs, Frank Ocean, Caribou) the album expands their emotional palette while keeping things strange, textured, and uniquely their own. WE WERE JUST HERE explodes into technicolor, creating a world that feels immediate, haunted and ecstatic.
A pollyanna is defined as an excessively cheerful or optimistic person. For it to be the title and inspiration of the opening track and lead single from Just Mustard’s third album, WE WERE JUST HERE, signals a Damascene moment for the Dundalk five-piece. Across their first two albums – 2018’s Wednesday and Partisan Records debut Heart Under from 2022 – the Irish band had become masters at creating haunting noise rock, Katie Ball’s bewitching vocals swirling amongst the sounds like smoke.
Heart Under, defined by a maelstrom of dark industrial noise and dreamy textures, explored themes of grief and longing, with imagery of being submerged deep underwater and gasping for air. On the remarkable WE WERE JUST HERE, the band reemerges, leaning towards the light and the rush of euphoria.
Across these 10 tracks, the band’s signature elements are still intact: guitars that are warped beyond recognition, twisted sound design that draws from the luminary world of Aphex Twin and cavernous low ends. Guitarists David Noonan and Mete Kalyoncuoğlu continue to take their instruments to wild and unrecognisable places, while the rhythm section of bassist Robert Hodgers Clarke and drummer Shane Maguire bring thudding sub bass and clattering percussion respectively. This time though, it’s all been channeled into a warmer and more anthemic path, opening up a new dimension of sound for the band.
“I was trying to write more optimistically, and feeling like a fraud sometimes,” Ball says. “To find ‘POLLYANNA’ as a title, I was looking up different words for toxic happiness. I was trying to achieve happiness even if it wasn’t always helpful. Euphoria was a word that kept coming up – trying to feel euphoric, but at a cost.”
“I don’t wanna go where I can’t feel a thing,” she sings on the bold and melodic ‘DREAMER’, while the album’s title track – the perfect mix of their thudding signature guitar sound and new commitment to lightness and warmth – explodes into technicolour noise after Ball’s declaration: “I just wanna make it feel good.”
The singer adds: “I was trying to put myself in places of physical joy to try and get that euphoric feeling.” Across the album, songs draw from a wide spectrum of emotion and feeling, with characters searching for ecstasy, holding onto love and grasping for the rush of feeling alive. The vocals foreground these feelings, and the intricately crafted compositions behind them back up the urge, whether on the propulsive ‘SILVER’ or the explosive ‘ENDLESS DEATHLESS’.
Produced by Noonan and the band, they aimed for directness and immediacy with their songwriting. While their approach to composition had previously been inspired by their love of electronic music, starting with instrumental loops and textures and later weaving vocal ideas around them, the band made a conscious decision to reverse engineer this process on WWJH. For them this meant adopting a more traditional method, looking to the swirling rock and dynamic song structures of Nirvana and My Bloody Valentine and striving for big, bold, fully encompassing songs.
“The vocal structure was the most important thing,” Noonan says of how the songs for WE WERE JUST HERE were built. With choruses bursting with melody and brightness, Ball’s vocals rise higher in the mix throughout the album, partly as a purely sonic decision but also to hammer home feelings of positivity, albeit sometimes conflicted ones.
While it presents an expanded emotional palette for the band, everything is still directed through their unique lens, feeling Lynchian in the way it shoots for happiness but ends up with something stranger, more complicated and more fascinating.
The strange and distinct universe the band create on record is reinforced with haunting interludes of warped speech and noise: “We wanted to create levels of texture in the album that could recall different layers of memory and time, also injecting some of our own personal experience of creating into the finished tracks. We used snippets of voice memos from the writing process, some elements are from the first recorded version or from various demos, and in the studio used a mixture of digital and analogue equipment and 1/2” tape processing.”
The idea of place was also key when writing, the band thinking about clubs and dancefloors as settings which directed them to strive for something immediate and urgent. “When we were writing the songs, we could actually sometimes see different rooms and imagine playing this song in this venue”. While most of the rooms popping into his head weren’t cavernous arenas, the band’s extensive 2023 tour of South America in support of The Cure also pointed towards the opportunity for a bigger and more expansive sound.
WE WERE JUST HERE was recorded at the Black Mountain studio just outside of the band’s hometown of Dundalk. As with Heart Under, they brought in David Wrench (Frank Ocean, FKA twigs) to mix the record. “It’s amazing how he seemingly added more melody to the songs just through processing,” Noonan says, relishing in handing the album to someone else after “our hands had been all over it,” with Wrench pulling out even more depth and strength to Ball’s vocals.
As a band more interested in gesturing towards themes rather than ramming narratives down listeners’ throats, WE WERE JUST HERE was the perfect title for the new album. The band reflect; “If you put the emphasis on any of the four words, it can mean something different.”
As such, you can ingest Ball’s lyrics as a conflicted and toxic grasp at positivity, or a cathartic breakthrough into blissful, true euphoria. Whichever way it’s received, it arrives in the package of a revelatory new album, one that takes Just Mustard’s music to ecstatic new places. For Heart Under, a core concept of the album was to make listeners feel like they were travelling through a tunnel. With WE WERE JUST HERE, they explode out into the blinding light.