Just Mustard are searching for pure bliss

After being submerged under the weight of grief and longing from their last album, 2022's Heart Under, the five-piece has come a long way to find relief in an exploration of ecstasy on its follow up We Were Just Here. Speaking with BEST FIT back in 2019, the five-piece reflected on the rich DIY music scene of, Dundalk, their hometown on the east coast of Ireland, and how it informed the band’s beginnings. Six years later, they're plunging themselves into a new direction on a record true to their signature sound: warped guitars and haunting vocals that sit among layers of textures and deliver an emotional reset for the band.

Writing the album in Dundalk, vocalist Katie Ball found herself searching for euphoria in places she'd never been before. While writing outside of herself, she visited imaginary, emotional locations in an effort to capture a specific feeling. “It was striving to create spaces in your head to get to or have a certain type of experience,” recalls guitarist David Noonan. Even while placing themselves in unknown, cognitive settings throughout writing, Dundalk remained an influential aspect on the new record. “There’s a good DIY attitude in the town, in the music community,” Noonan continues. “We try to do as much as we can ourselves and work with people who we know. We bring in friends to collaborate with and try not to ship too much stuff out to people outside of our community." Escapism became a recurring theme on the album as the band intentionally challenged themselves to source imaginary destinations evoking bliss and lightness in their writing process.

Where Heart Under saw the band channeling an ominous, lamenting noise-rock that confined listeners in its heaviness, on We Were Just Here, they release themselves from this inescapable weight. “I think that searching for euphoria is the natural reaction to grief,” Ball tells me. “You've done all the sadness and then you're trying to experience happiness and sometimes it's very intense."

Redirection in sound and mindset became distinct after writing “Pollyanna” and “Endless Deathless” – “You can talk lyrically, but even musically and as a performing band, we wanted to move into playing music that was more exciting, danceable, and direct,” Noonan explains. “I’m trying to bring the euphoric and uplifting elements to [the show] as opposed to being too much on the downer, tense and moody side."

Writing these two songs was quintessential to set the tone for the record, fostering a clear intention on the feeling each member wanted across the album. “'Pollyanna’ had a lot of uncertainty and apprehension, but excitement as well,” Ball adds. “‘Endless Deathless’ was instant excitement. We were like This is all of our favourite song!... All the songs we wrote afterwards had to excite us as much as those two – it was a level we were trying to bring ourselves to the whole time."

Despite excitement and euphoria taking centre stage on the new record, Just Mustard eloquently leave room for ambiguity and duality. The album title itself alludes to several interpretations depending on where emphasis is placed on each word.

“The emphasis is on ‘here’ for me at the minute,” says Noonan. We are ‘here’ and struggling on. It feels very present to us, we’re in the process of making the album and putting it out,” Ball has a different approach: “It’s a hard thing for me to figure out because I wrote the lyrics for the song ‘We Were Just Here.’ So I think ‘we were just here’ as a sentence means something to me that it doesn’t mean to other people, from what I was thinking at the time. I think it's such a good album title because you can just take different things from it.”.

“When we're touring it's definitely ‘here’ because we are ‘here,’ but when we're at home it's ‘we were.’ Maybe because we were just touring but we're not anymore,”.

Deciphering the double-edged sword between toxic positivity versus pure bliss was key to Ball’s approach in more optimistic writing: “[At the time] I was like ‘Okay, I need to feel alive,’” she recalls, “and then I thought ‘I’m trying to feel happy’ is a weird thing to say. If you're trying to feel happy, it means you're sad…It was hard to [write optimistically] with what I was feeling in myself and the world around seemed to be falling apart.”

Her method of crafting captivating lyrics is well-understood by Ball’s bandmates. As Noonan explains, “[writing] can just show you how you’re feeling sometimes… Letting words come out and seeing what it tells you about what you’re thinking - I think it’s a really cathartic process to do that and get a frame of what is floating around your subconscious.”

Exploring her imagination in writing might be freeing to Ball, but performing can feel like a constant return to where she felt in the original process. “Even though you might have worked through a lot of stuff, every time you have to play the song you're like ‘Oh back here again.’” she concludes. “It puts you in the brain you're in when you wrote [the song], which is the difficult thing."