Just Mustard

Last year, the gazey noise-rock Dundalk band Just Mustard turned ten years old. However, this milestone went by without much notice or ceremony from their members.

“I think there was a chunk taken out with COVID and stuff,” the band’s vocalist, Katie Ball, told us back in October, when she reflected on their longevity. “So, it feels like we’ve been a band for a long time, but it doesn’t feel like we’ve spent a lot of time touring or anything.”

“[Before the lockdowns], it felt like we’d been a band for ages already, and then, looking back on it, we only released our first album in 2018, toured a bit in 2019, and then 2020 was lockdowns,” adds their guitarist, David Noonan. “So, that time in my head is longer since COVID. Way more stuff has happened since then. So, it almost feels not true.”

Since the release of their debut album, Wednesday, in 2018, Just Mustard rose to prominence through coveted support slots for the likes of The Cure, Depeche Mode, Fontaines D.C., and Wolf Alice, and playing at some of Europe and North America’s largest festivals.

“Every cool opportunity or support slot we’ve gotten was never something that we could imagine having,” admits Katie. “So, whenever we got offers like that, we just thought, ‘Oh, we could never imagine having this!’”

For the decade that Just Mustard has been active, they have managed to retain their original line-up. Katie and David feel that, despite their gruelling schedules, what has helped keep them consolidated beyond their established camaraderie is their imperturbable attitude towards their vocation.

“I find it even hard to think of music as a career,” admits Katie. “I don’t really think of it like that. I think taking the career aspect out of it is good, in a way, because it feels like it’s too ‘business-y’ or something. I don’t really see it as a business.”

“In terms of if something is good to do, or if something is, quote-unquote, ‘Good for your career’ or whatever, it’s just your gut instinct and whether it’s something you want to do,” adds David.

“It’s how you feel. Obviously, you have to push yourself out of your comfort zone, but we’re all music fans. We love music, so if there’s a band that we get the opportunity to play with, if we like their music, it’s a pretty easy decision for us. We don’t think of it as, ‘Is this a good look?’ It’s just thinking of it as music.”

This relaxed demeanour is why Just Mustard felt permitted to take a break from touring in 2024 and focus solely on their next album. Finding it difficult and tiring to write on the road, and with a bunch of half-finished ideas in their pockets, they made an ultimatum: “No more gigs until the album is done.”

From October 2024 to August 2025, Just Mustard spent all their time writing, recording, and mastering their third studio album, WE WERE JUST HERE. Last August, the band announced that the album would be dropping in October. “We don’t really like the drawn-out campaigns, ourselves,” explains Katie of the sudden announcement.

Forming in the infancy of the postpunk boom of the 2010s, Just Mustard became known for their jagged, harsh but spacious and celestial sound. But on WE WERE JUST HERE, the band decided to go in a more euphonic direction. For the first time, Just Mustard wrote the music around Katie’s singing; whereas, hitherto, Katie accommodating the instrumentation had been tradition.

“When we were first writing Wednesday, Gilla Band were around then, and they would’ve been very inspiring to us,” Katie says. “And we were very inspired by a lot of electronic music, as well, and electronic music structures, so the way I always did the vocals was to fit it around the music and be more of an instrument and less of a lead vocalist, you know what I mean?

“That was just the way we were doing it at the time, and I think you do that for two albums and you’re like, ‘Alright, let’s change it up a little bit.’ Also, there’s a desire to write melodically, because it’s easier to play live. [Laughs]

“Like, the last album [2022’s Heart Under] was very primarily sub-bass, which is very difficult to do live. I think we wanted to focus on the songs and the melodies, and it all kind of came together like that, really. But it was a natural growth, really. Gilla Band inspired people at the start, then we just wanted to grow.”

“I think, as well, in the past, we were atmosphere-led, in the sense that everything was just about the mood and the feeling of it all, and how it fell together,” adds David. “With this one, we did have a couple of ideas before we started writing, which was, we wanted to be more extreme with the moods and let them be more separate from each other.

“Our last album was one, containing an atmosphere across the whole thing. This one, we wanted to be more technicolour, and if something is really dark and heavy, let it be more dark and heavy, and if something’s really bright and light, it can be that, and it can be separate, rather than pull it all into the middle and make it all feel it has to fit with each other. They can not fit, and be part of a wider palette.”

From April, Just Mustard will begin a European tour in support of WE WERE JUST HERE. In 2019, they supported The Cure at Malahide Castle, and they will reunite with them this year at Marlay Park in June. On May 1st, they will perform their largest Irish headline show to date at Dublin’s 3Olympia Theatre.

“It’s hard to know what they [the audience] should expect,” Katie says of their new show. “We’re constantly refining the live production and working on it as we go.” “Yeah, visually, it’s going to feel like a new show compared to if you’ve seen us before,” adds David. “The music is, obviously, newer, but we’re working on switching it up a bit, but we’re still in the gestation situation.”

Just Mustard’s latest album, WE WERE JUST HERE, is out now. They will perform at Dublin’s 3Olympia Theatre on May 1st, 2026, and at Marlay Park on June 26th. Tickets for all shows can be purchased at justmustard.ie.