Irish noisegazers Just Mustard returned with their third album WE WERE JUST HERE a couple months ago, but are saving their full-throttle promotional activities for 2026 – they’ll be covering Europe, the UK, and North America over the course of two months next Spring. The North American leg kicks off in Seattle in May, and I can’t imagine they haven’t already scheduled a return to KEXP’s studios for a session. They did a four-song set for them in May of 2022, on the first of two trips across the pond that year in support of Heart Under.
Going through the Flickr photo gallery of the session, I was particularly interested in this shot of one of the band’s pedalboards, but a little digging shows it’s actually bassist Rob Clarke’s board – the Boss bass EQ should have been the tip-off – as he discussed a few of the more esoteric selections in an AMA three years ago.
More six-string-oriented and recent is this feature in Premier Guitar, which runs down both Dave Noonan and Mete Kalyon’s rigs, though quite interesting there’s no Electro-Harmonix Freeze listed in either of their current setups. I had assumed that the signature scream they get out of their guitars was from a sustain pedal of that ilk, but maybe not?
Just Mustard’s Art of Noise @ Premier Guitar
Well a more recent AMA may provide some answers – when asked, “How do you make your guitars sound like slaughter houses?”, the answer:
Also, ZVEX Machine
u/justmustardband
The unique crossover distortion box doesn’t account for the endless sustain, but the texture it produces certainly sounds right. And there we are.
They also talk about how their sonic exploration works within their songwriting, and how that’s evolved, in conversation with Post-Punk.com:
I’ve always loved your use of effect pedals. How do you generally write songs? Do the effect loops work as your backbone? For lack of a better term, do you “jam?”
David Noonan: It’s a little different every time. Sometimes Katie might have chords and lyrics and vocal melodies or someone in the band might bring an instrumental piece to work on, or someone may have a vocal melody that hasn’t been put down. Maybe not that last part as much anymore, but otherwise, anything really goes. It could be one single instrument that forms the backbone of a core song.
Our process has certainly evolved over time. We do try and jam but it wasn’t necessarily working for us that much at this time. It wasn’t the most fruitful way to come up with music for us. We do work better with people bringing in ideas, with Katie writing the lyrics, and we just kind of go from there.
I think this time the thing that was different was that we decided early on before we’d even really started writing that we wanted the vocal melody and the lyric to lead the song more, so we applied that more this time. Previously, we would find ourselves trying to shoehorn a song into a musical idea, so this time we just flipped it and let the vocals guide the rest of the arrangement.
Out of Heaven — An Interview with Just Mustard @ Post-Punk.com
And there’s additional press here:
Just Mustard on how “mad experience” of touring with The Cure inspired their new album @ NME
New-Found Technicolour: Just Mustard Interviewed @ Clash
Just Mustard on Making WE WERE JUST HERE | Interview @ HeadStuff
Just Mustard on ‘We Were Just Here’ & Irish Music Scene @ A-Indie
