Just Mustard on searching for euphoria, toxic positivity and Dundalk’s DIY music scene
Ahead of the release of their third studio album, WE WERE JUST HERE, Sarah Gill sat down with Katie Ball of Just Mustard to talk sonic inspirations, the Lynchian ethos, and how all good art comes back to finding ways to feel alive.
Since the five-piece Dundalk band dropped their debut album Wednesday in 2018, they’ve been falling under many different umbrellas—rock, alternative, experimental, shoegaze, electronic—and drawing many varying comparisons—Massive Attack, Portishead, My Bloody Valentine—but the overarching consensus is that they’re loud, layered and bone-shakingly ethereal.
Their 2022 sophomore album, Heart Under, etched out a trance-like melancholic moodiness that draws you in through layers of fuzzy textures, and now, WE WERE JUST HERE (out November 24) ups the saturation into gleaming technicolour. There’s a new dimension to their sound, a definition to the distortion, and a willful optimism that you could almost reach out and touch.
The band—made up of Katie Ball on vocals, guitarist and backing vocalist David Noonan, guitarist Mete Kalyoncuoglu, bassist Rob Clarke, and drummer Shane Maguire—wrapped up recording the ten tracks this time last year, passing them over to David Wrench (who has worked with FKA Twigs and Frank Ocean) for a final mix. Chatting with Katie over Zoom, I comment on her vocals. Where they were once artfully woven through the tracks, they’re now standing to the forefront, carrying greater weight than before.
“On the last two albums, I used my vocals as an instrument to fit in around the music,” Katie says. “This time around, I wanted to make it so that the vocals led the song, which meant that the melodies had to be more interesting. I really wanted them to come through strongly.”
Don’t get me wrong, the industrial noisiness remains, but this time with a clarity that feels anthemic. Just Mustard makes music that envelopes you, fizzing with adrenaline so that when one track ends, it feels like you’ve just stepped off the waltzers and your head (and ears) are ringing. It is, ultimately, music that makes you feel alive, whether that’s listened to through headphones on the bus or at a deafening live set. It suspends you mid-air, fills you with that weird sensation of when your arm’s been dead and begins to gnaw back some feeling. It’s tingly.
Unsurprisingly, the quest for rapture is a big theme for the album as a whole. The opening track and first single released, ‘POLLYANNA’, is all about the fraudulent optimist, which Katie relates to.
“I was going through a tough period, mentally, from 2019 to 2023 and I felt this pressure to be happier. I felt paranoid that I was a depressing person to be around, so I was trying to make myself seem happier, even if I didn’t necessarily feel it,” she explains. “I wanted to write songs from a lighter place, and I found it quite hard. I wasn’t getting any ideas from my own brain or from the world, so I had to imagine myself in different places as different people. It’s hard to be happy, and I felt like I was trying to feel that way much more than I was trying to be that way.”
“The ending scene of Aftersun, where Paul Mescal is on the dancefloor, influenced some of the album. In my head, certain songs are set on that dancefloor. He looks like he’s dancing for his life, and that was inspiring for me in that search for euphoria.”
The band have been weaving some of the tracks into their live set, so I wonder whether that feeling of ecstasy comes through more when playing them to a crowd. “I really like playing ‘THAT I MIGHT NOT SEE’ live, because once I start singing, I don’t stop until two minutes in for about two bars and I’m straight back in. It feels like getting on a rollercoaster. It’s hectic and quite hypnotic.”
Back in 2016, almost ten years ago, Katie, David, Mete, Rob and later, Shane’s interests met in the form of My Bloody Valentine, Nirvana and Pixies. Katie also points to Kim Deal as a big source of inspiration in realising that you could be a singer and a frontwoman with a softer voice. You can hear those points of reference coming through still, alongside fragments of Grimes creeping through in tracks like ‘DREAMER’ and ‘SOMEWHERE’.
“Myself and David are very visual in our approach when we’re writing music,” Katie says. “David Lynch’s ethos of not giving the meaning behind his work resonates with me. When I look up the meaning behind a song, it kind of ruins it for me. I like being able to make my own world within a song. With our music, I just want people to take as much as they can from it.”
In Ireland, it feels quite rare for a band to come up here and choose to stay put, but Just Mustard are enmeshed in the Dundalk music scene. I wonder if being from a border town with such a strong focus on emerging music impacted their sound.
“Being from Dundalk definitely plays into our music. Because we’re so far removed from the industry side of it, we don’t really try to make music that’s trendy. I feel like in London, you can be so aware of the music industry, which I don’t think should come into your writing at all,” Katie explains. “Dundalk’s scene is very DIY. David recorded our first album and I used to make all the music videos. We just weren’t trying to do anything that people were also doing, because we weren’t aware of what people were doing unless they were from Dundalk. Our influences were quite localised, our peers were all from Dundalk and we didn’t really know what the right or wrong way to go about it was. I think that’s really important, to focus on the music above all else.”
Next year marks ten years of Just Mustard, so naturally, I ask for some advice for those hoping to make their mark on the Irish music scene. “My advice would be: don’t take advice,” Katie says. “We didn’t. We were told not to release our debut album, to release a couple of singles and EPs instead and wait until there’s label interest, and we ignored that. I remember thinking at the time, I don’t remember any Nirvana EPs, so I want to release an album. Just focus on the music and trust your gut in your decision-making.”
From opening for Katie’s brother’s band at the Spirit Store in Dundalk to opening for The Cure at Malahide Castle in 2019 (and again in Marlay Park next June!), supporting both Fontaines DC and Wolf Alice on tour, and playing on stage in New York, teenage Katie comes through every now and then to remind her to take a minute and realise how crazy life can be.
WE WERE JUST HERE is released on Friday, November 24.
Photography by Greg Purcell, Conor James, and Kate Lawlor (Daisy Chains Photos).
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