Backstage at the Choice Music Prize in 2023, Just Mustard stood a hair’s breadth from Sinéad O’Connor, their musical idol. The Dundalk band were delighted to be in the vicinity of an icon but unsure what to do.
“I wanted to go and say hello, because obviously I love her music and everything she stands for,” says Dave Noonan, the band’s guitarist. “But I always have this feeling, whenever I see someone like that, that I’m going to leave them be. I don’t regret not saying hello. But I do wish I did.”
To be in the orbit of Sinéad O’Connor yet wary of intruding on her personal space is a dilemma typical of these indie dark horses. Just Mustard are card-carrying songwriting introverts, softly spoken, not big on eye contact and with tunes that arrive bathed in a fuzzy glow of understatement.
But, as is often true of quiet people with a lot going on under the surface, when they get properly worked up, the forces unleashed are breathtaking – and more than a little unsettling.
RM Block
That was the case when they supported the goth godfathers The Cure at Malahide Castle in the pre-pandemic bliss of summer 2019 and blew away the mid-afternoon audience who had arrived early at the bucolic Co Dublin venue.
This ability to bring both intimacy and volume is also a feature of their extraordinary third album, We Were Just Here, a tour de force that sounds like heavy metal played from deep underwater or from the depths of a haunted woods. It’s Lady Galadriel of Lothlórien one moment, a mosh pit at a punk club the next.
If Just Mustard stand for anything it’s the idea that every underdog has its day. In addition to sharing a bill with The Cure, they toured the United States with Fontaines DC and, for good measure, then signed to the same label as the Joycean postpunks: the hip-as-anything, Brooklyn-headquartered Partisan Records.
Partisan doesn’t hand contracts out to just anybody. It’s selective about adding to a roster that also includes PJ Harvey, the Mercury winners Ezra Collective and the Banksy-adjacent punks Idles. As with all good record companies, it’s also supportive of groups eager to do things their own way – as was the case with Just Mustard, who spent the best part of a year on We Were Just Here, according to Noonan and the band’s singer, Katie Ball.
A thread of angst runs through the record – pain, they explain, that comes from a place of genuine struggle. Coming off the road after their acclaimed second LP, Heart Under, Ball and bandmates knew they had to change their way of working. Writing songs between stints of touring might be a plausible strategy for some artists, but not Just Mustard. They needed complete isolation and a sense of peace and quiet if they were to continue progressing musically.
“We did end up taking basically a year off gigging to write it,” Noonan says. “It’s difficult to get into a flow, going away for gigs for a couple of weeks and then coming back. One week to write and then going away. For some bands it works. We need to develop the ideas into a song. To get the full band doing a full arrangement, it takes time to tease that out. We have to go, ‘We’re not playing gigs until this is done.’”
[ Just Mustard: Heart Under review – Atmospheric sensualityOpens in new window ]
Dundalk is Ireland’s second-largest town, with a population of 43,000 and a distinctive cultural microclimate. It’s the home of The Corrs, the trad group The Mary Wallopers and the once all-conquering Dundalk FC. It’s also a source of inspiration and renewal for Just Mustard, who met through mutual friends a decade ago and have never felt a need to move anywhere else. Most artists crave the bright lights – but what if those bright lights are right outside your front door, as Just Mustard say is the case with Dundalk?
Maybe moving abroad “came up years ago. It didn’t feel right for us,” says Ball, who detoured into alternative pop after a stint as a candlemaker. (In 2022 she marked the release of Just Under with a limited edition Just Mustard-themed candle.)
“I always am happy in Dundalk. You go touring and you’re in cities all the time. And then you get to come home to a nice wee town. If I did live in London I’d probably spend a lot of time off in Dundalk anyway, because all my family and friends are here.”
Does Dundalk feel isolated in a music-business sense? Maybe, Noonan says. But that isn’t necessarily a negative. “We’re in our own space here. It’s never been a thing where we’ve felt that what we were doing had to be done from elsewhere. We have supportive people. Our friends are all here. A lot of people we work with would be from Dundalk. It’s handy – when we were starting out we were an hour from Dublin and an hour from Belfast.”
They’re proud of the town, of the soccer team and even of The Corrs – despite being a universe removed musically from the fiddle-bashing soft-pop siblings. “There’s a mural of them on the outside wall of a pub that they used to work in called Mc Manus’. It’s not a pub any more. I think it’s being knocked down. But I was into them when I was a kid,” Ball says. “Breathless is such a tune.”
When I was a child I was always singing, from when I could talk
— Katie Ball
Staying off the road to work on new music poses challenges when it comes to making a living. Sometimes you have to do other things to help with the rent. “We all have to pick up little bits of work,” Noonan says, pointing out that, according to the late Chicago indie producer Steve Albini, “if you can separate your income from your want to do music – your need for money from your need to do music – you can be a happy musician. It takes the commercial and the business aspect out of it. Just keeps it to art.
“That’s hard to do. They aren’t necessarily words to live by” in every situation. “But trying to separate things in your head” – the commercial and the creative – “can help.”
Just Mustard’s origins go back to the Dundalk music scene of the mid-2010s, when as teenagers they went to the same gigs together. Having started a band as a lark, they were given an early headline slot at the town’s Spirit Store venue and put out their debut, Wednesday, on the local label Pizza Pizza Records in 2018. That brought them to the attention of Partisan, and then came Heart Under, which was widely regarded as one of the best Irish albums of 2022.
Their dissonant-yet-melodic sound is often categorised as shoegaze, a genre that emerged in the early 1990s and features layers of diaphanous vocals and lashings of reverb. But where shoegaze tends towards the dreamy, their music has a component of the nightmarish: on new songs such as Endless Deathless (a hat-tip to Nirvana’s Endless Nameless), Ball sings less as an angel than as a vengeful spirit out for your soul, while Noonan’s guitars have an ominous, chain-rattling quality.
Ball says she had to grow into standing in front of an audience and emoting from the depths of her soul. Even during early shows at the 220-capacity Spirit Store, she was intensely aware of strangers looking at her. To become comfortable with that took an age.
“My first time being in a band was with Just Mustard. We took off quite quickly, I suppose, playing loads of gigs. I’m fine now. But for the first two, three years of us being a band, I couldn’t hear my vocals at all. It was so loud. It wasn’t until I got the in-ear monitors that I could hear what was going on.
“It was always a guessing game: am I going to be able to hear my vocals tonight? Let’s see. That was a big part of it, not being able to hear what I was doing onstage. I don’t know if it comes naturally to me, the centre of attention in a room. I keep doing it anyway.
“When I was a child I was always singing, from when I could talk. When I became a teenager I was, ‘Ah, don’t look at me.’ Maybe that stayed on into my adult life.”
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The opportunity to support The Cure six years ago included an audience with Robert Smith, the band’s singer. Just Mustard found him affable and very much in on the joke about his status as a supposed rock legend. They were hugely heartened to see him subsequently take on Ticketmaster over its gouge-the-punter dynamic-pricing policy in the United States.
“It goes to show you can do something about it,” Ball says of The Cure going up against the ticketing giant. “Other artists will have you think there’s nothing you can do. There is. It’s always inspiring when bigger artists do something like that.”
We Were Just Here is released by Partisan Records
