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SOUND HAPPY WEDNESDAYS Landing on the shortlist f
or this year’s Choice Music Prize is garnering Dundalk act Just Mustard more attention for their magnificent debut LP. words Danny Wilson photo Ryan McArdle & Curtis Morris “Have you seen Just Mustard yet?” has, over the last few years, become one of the more common utterances for those that concern themselves with the domestic music landscape. The Dundalk five piece – specialising in a satisfying brand of 90s informed post-punk that flits between industrial clatter and ethereal shimmering – have fast cemented a reputation as one of the country’s most exciting emergent live concerns. The quintet’s underground credentials were only solidified with the release of their debut LP Wednesday. The record’s eight tracks reveal a young band operating with an almost heretofore unseen degree of confidence and faith in their craft. The first release from Dundalk’s own Pizza Pizza Records, Wednesday isn’t afraid to flirt with less than en vogue touchstones, from Swirlies and Autolux to our own My Bloody Valentine and Whipping Boy. So, when this bruising, feedback swaddled release from an unknown indie label got the deserved (if surprising) nod for this year’s Choice Music Prize – we thought it best to reach out to the five Mustardeers – David, KT, Mete, Rob and Shane – to see how they feel about bringing some overdue spice to this year’s competition. – Can you tell me a little about how the band first got together? What have you been up to over the last few years as you worked toward your debut album? David: We got together around 2016, we spent a while writing songs, put out some singles locally, but fairly quickly morphed away from what we were doing then when Shane, our drummer, joined in early 2017. Since then we started writing a lot more fluidly and as a group began to create something we were all excited about. KT: Yeah, we didn’t really get up to much until we released the album, other than writing and recording it. We’d only really played shows in Dundalk and the odd Dublin show. We’ve been going all over the shop since. – And all you guys are based in Dundalk? How do you find it as a creative space? Ever any temptation to move elsewhere? Shane: I live in Dublin, it’s too expensive. I’m very tempted to move home to the jewel of Ireland that is Dundalk town. KT: I wouldn’t be tempted to move anywhere myself yet – I feel very much at home in Dundalk. It’s a creative town, as a teenager all my friends were in bands or were artists, it would have been awfully difficult to avoid doing the same myself! Just look at all the different artists coming out of Dundalk over the years, there must be something in the stout. Mete: If you don’t do something creative like start a band you will go insane. You are also surrounded by other maniacs in the same position. So, all things considered it’s probably the best environment to write music. – How beneficial has it been to have a creative hub like The Spirit Store? S: It has had a big effect. Getting experience and support slots in such a high quality venue when you’re starting out is very helpful. It is also great for meeting people as it’s where a lot of music heads in Dundalk go drinking. KT: It’s great, Mark, Derek and Alan of the Spirit Store have been incredibly supportive of us from the start and really encouraged us to keep things going as a band. We are very grateful to them. M: Dundalk is small but there are a lot of very talented musicians here, and most of them come to The Store for gigs. When your audience is packed with people who are more talented than yourself it really pushes you to write good music and to give your best performance. – How did you approach making your first album? Did you consider that the songs should be in conversation with one another or did you treat each track as an individual piece? KT: Wednesday is more or less just a collection of the songs we had written at the time that we considered our best. We took our time with the album and allowed space for our sound to develop as we were recording. You could say every song is its own individual piece, we wouldn’t really be thinking of the other songs we have when writing. D: We did make a conscious effort to make the whole album come together as one piece, sonically. We didn’t want to treat each song as its own single track in the mixing process, we wanted there to be a strong cohesiveness to the sound of every instrument on each song. We 78