Just Mustard return world-weary with crystal vision on We Were Just Here

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.

Just Mustard is, at its core vibrations, about making these layers of perspective audible, and certifiably gnarly, at that. Plucked from the Garden of Shoegaze are the forbidden fruits of shrill noise effects, walls of echo and reverb, and serenely unintelligible vocals. They posit that melody should have teeth, and vocals should be a siren sound, that the barest of ideas can transform with enough maximalism.

Their previous career-high was 2022’s Heart Under, a functionally identical record to their newly birthed We Were Just Here, which has seen fit to look at its predecessor and wipe the smudges off its proverbial lenses. Where the former specialised in ludicrous, gothic soundplay, the latter takes the straightforwardly revolutionary path of doing the very same with more money. I can now hear my tinnitus forming in higher echelons of quality.

Opener “Pollyanna” suitably charts a new path for the group from the very outset, chucking the exercise in mood of Heart Under’s first moments in favour of a freight train plowing through the mix; the feedback which is tamed and unleashed on the listener has a cyclical manipulation that, like a lot of their best tracks, grounds a fascinating rhythm. Much of the record takes the well-traveled Just Mustard path of slamming guitar pedals together until a mind-melding guitar sound summersaults out the other end. This process may as well be the Ted Lasso Way for shoegaze, but few others can boast the ear for melody and a measured control of the chaos like Lovecraftian, tortured Blondie.

Unlike previous outings, there’s a palpable sense that most of their chips have been thrown into a single song, the title track pumping energy into either side of the record. The mesh of instrumentation on the chorus, replete with rippling feedback, synths, and strings, is a primordial soup for Katie Ball to eulogise the old guard and pray for newness to spring from the ether. But then a verse flutters in, and the same chorus is repeated, sentiment and all, without a change or a chance in sight. Everything happens, nothing ever happens, who knows? We care. We all care so much that our lives could not be any louder if we tried. It’s a death rattle for something; how well Just Mustard have figured it out just depends on how well you can read between the lines. Anything’s possible in there.