It’s always a red-letter day at Static Sounds Club when new music drops from Just Mustard. You can hear me bouncing off the walls with excitement from miles away. Ever since Wednesday scrambled my senses back in 2018, they’ve remained a band whose every move feels like a tectonic shift. When Heart Under hit in 2022, it felt like stepping inside a black box recorder mid-fall. Dense textures. Gnarled guitars. Katie Ball’s voice moving through the cracks like light through shutters. There’s always been something elemental about their sound. It doesn’t wash over you. It pulls you under.
They’ve been relatively quiet since then. Touring, yes. Picking up new disciples in dark rooms across the globe. But now they’ve broken the silence with a new single. It’s called ‘Pollyanna’ and it’s an absolute stunner.
From the off, ‘Pollyanna’ plants you on uneasy ground. The pulse of seismic feedback becomes the back bone of the track. That drum pattern throbs with a robotic precision. It feels less like a beat and more like the ticking of something buried and mechanical. There’s a faint metallic taste to the sound. The guitars flicker and flash but there’s no fuzz or chaos here. They’ve been stripped back to pure function, gleaming and sharpened like surgical tools.
Katie’s vocals glide through the mix with an unnerving stillness. Her delivery, as always is close and confessional. There’s no drama, no reaching for the rafters. Just quiet detachment. It’s cold but never lifeless. If anything, that blankness is what makes it hit so hard. She sounds like she’s narrating a dream while still inside it. What really gets under the skin is how locked in the band feel. Every part has its place. No one’s overreaching. The song feels airtight. It’s not minimal in a sparse way but there’s zero clutter. Everything feeds the mood. That creeping dread. That dead-eyed calm.
There’s talk that the title references Pollyanna syndrome. A kind of forced optimism that denies reality at all costs. You can hear that idea in the song’s bones. There’s a tension between the mechanical groove and the eerie restraint of the vocal. Like smiling through a migraine. It never quite explodes. It just sits there. Staring.
It’s hard to tell whether this is the beginning of a new album cycle but it certainly feels like a statement. They’re pushing the template again. Less abstraction. More control. A new kind of precision. The raw emotion is still there but it’s being channelled through colder veins. That’s a thrilling direction for a band who’ve always been fearless in how they evolve.
‘Pollyanna’ is out now via Partisan Records and is absolutely worth your full attention. Stick it on. Let it sink in. But watch out! It whispers to you, waits for you to come closer and once you’re in there’s no way back. Why would you want to?
Something’s stirring in Dundalk again.
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