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Cardinals’ debut album ‘Masquerade’ is cohesive, confrontational and fully formed - a statement of intent from a band already looking beyond genre.
BARBED
WIRE
BARBED WIRE
Cardinals’ debut album ‘Masquerade’ is cohesive, confrontational and fully formed - a statement of intent from a band already looking beyond genre.
At this stage, there isn’t loads more to say about the rise of Irish bands, even if the existence of a country supporting the arts and grassroots venues still feels like an alien concept to anyone remotely acquainted with the British state. County Cork’s Cardinals, a band defined not by their heritage but by how they have fused it with a post-punk-slash-folk-rock stamp that is eminently individual, prove once again that to describe them as just another Irish rock group would be reductive in the extreme.
Their debut album, ‘Masquerade’, sets them apart as a quintet firmly ploughing their own route through the scene. Represented by an album cover depicting a starkly raw winter scene, contrasting sharply with writhing red bodies below, it is a record not shy in its desire to play with form or expectation. Tracks such as ‘Barbed Wire’, which reverberate with a jaunty goth-pop cheek, find themselves spliced together with folk ballads like 6-minute closer ‘As I Breathe’. Elsewhere, ‘Anhedonia’ tells the story of a night fight over a blistering trad-rock palette, whilst ‘The Burning of Cork’ uses its storming 1 minute 59 seconds to pointedly draw comparison between Britain’s destruction of Ireland and its current role in the Palestinian genocide.
Debut albums can sometimes seem unsteady, myriad ideas thrown at a wall that’s been built on shaky, uncertain foundations. ‘Masquerade’ is quite the opposite. It is all muscle, all action, all killer. “I think when we started out [to write the album] it was just writing songs and seeing where it took us,” vocalist Euan Manning explains. “We were trying to create something that felt cohesive but not strongly arranged for fear that it would become something dull for us. I think it became its own thing along the way.”
This idea of cohesion is something which the band haven’t always had at the forefront of their creative endeavours – likely the reason they’ve reached the stage where they can somehow combine an accordion into blues-rock title-track ‘Masquerade’ and it not seem out of place – but an album is a very different beast to an EP. “I think that the limitation that having an accordion alongside a traditional band structure imposes upon the group became the sort of guideline for writing,” Euan recalls.
He continues: “I think putting creative limitations and boundaries on the project probably made it easier because we were writing within a pathway. If anything influenced the sonic palette, it was just the idea that the record has to be cohesive, and so we had to put limits on what we were doing so we could create an album like this.”
Likewise, Euan’s vocal can travel from a quivering near-whisper at the start of ‘The Burning of Cork’ yet reach up into the sky in ‘Over At Last’, a track which turns the famously tricky middle of the record into arguably its finest moment.
“It was important to all of us that the album held together because that’s the music we want to listen to,” Euan states, “but I think we wanted to step outside of the traditional songwriting structures.
“I feel like we did that a couple of times across the album, which is nice, because to do that and make it cohesive can be difficult. I think it just feels fresh.”
It’s this freshness, this idea that Cardinals are a fluid entity not confined to creating dark, brooding, alt-pop just because they did it in their first single, that is reinforced in their aforementioned album artwork.
Where their 2024 self-titled EP cover presented the band as a suave yet moody five-piece – one which has been firmly adopted in many of the bands following photo shoots – ‘Masquerade’ leans heavily on the lighter aspects to really open up distance between the higher BPM moments on ‘Barbed Wire’ and ‘Anhedonia’ and the more languid, elongated sway of ‘St Agnes’.
“I think definitely we have a gothic aspect,” Euan smirks, “but we’re not so hard-assed and fascist about it that like everything has to be black!
“The colour [of the artwork] was just so striking when we first saw it. The colour is a big thing because it’s pretty contrasted; there’s a duality, intimacy and separation to the painting that I think features heavily on the record. Honestly, it was just a gut feeling when we first saw it.”
Just as the external factors have grown to meet the band at each new step along the way, the musical influences have journeyed to places that have not traditionally lain at the heart of the Cardinals universe. In 2024, they described their music as “pop music at its core”, would they say that was still the case?
Guitarist Oskar Gudinovic ponders this. “We definitely branched out, I think a lot of us started listening to a lot of different things throughout writing the album.
“We listened to a lot of Elias Rønnenfelt and Dean Blunt; we were big into Nine Inch Nails during the campaign, too. So, I think a lot of your classic rock or pop influences are still running through the album.”
Euan nods: “I think ‘Masquerade’ is pretty much a pop song, but then there are other songs with time signature and BPM changes that aren’t regularly featured in pop.
“I guess we like to describe it as pop because we feel that it can be anything and live outside of boundaries. If we called it folk or trad, we’d be stuck in some pretty set boundaries – I think calling it pop music just lets us do our thing without having to stick to something specific.”
Lyrically, Euan’s storytelling follows this same pattern by divulging personal experiences – or tales from friends and history – in such a way as to allow anyone listening to walk alongside him, or even to take his place in the narrative.
“To give people space to have their own interpretations is important to me, yeah,” he posits, “not even to have space, but pretty much to have the whole thing.
“When the record comes out, we consider it to be not really ours anymore. I wouldn’t dare ascribe an official meaning to a track because I think that hurts the record in the long run. I don’t think we should even have a foothold in what people are going to interpret from the record, to be honest.”
As we stand about a month out from release date, it’s clear that Euan and Oskar are ready to let go of these 11 songs and hear how they transform when in the hands of their fans. Even if they don’t have set plans for each song, or for the album as a whole, what are their hopes for what comes next?
“The release has kind of crept up on us,” Euan says, “but we are pretty desperate for it to come out now.
“I just hope that people listen to it, and whatever happens after that’s kind of in their hands. I hope people are able to sit down and focus on it for 33 minutes or whatever it is, but, honestly, my own attention span is pretty fried at the moment!”
Oskar nods: “I had a dream three nights ago that I was doom-scrolling – like I was literally scrolling on Instagram looking at memes and stuff. I woke up all clammy. I think that was a bit of a wake-up call.
“But yeah, I just hope people enjoy [‘Masquerade’], and they can take something from it, whether that’s comfort or a life lesson or whatever that might be. I’d also like peace and open borders; I’d like to see less violence in the world as we go forward.”
Within the swirling, marauding flames of ‘Masquerade’, Cardinals find themselves at the right place at the right time. Supported by a sound uniquely their own yet universally understood, it isn’t a question of how far they can go, it’s how quick they can get there. ■
Taken from the March 2026 issue of Dork. Cardinals’ album ‘Masquerade’ is out 13th February.