Words by Huw Baines
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Euan Manning looks up at the ceiling, momentarily struggling to understand his younger self. Framed in a Zoom window a matter of hours after getting back to Cork following the final bout of touring in a busy 2025, Cardinals’ frontman eventually admits: “I’m not sure what I meant by that.”
It’s just been put to him that, the last time he spoke with NME, he said his plans for the band included making a debut album that might one day be considered a classic, both on its own merits and as a representation of the city that reared them. Cardinals’ first LP is set for release next month, following up a string of singles that marked them out as a special prospect by rapidly evolving from precocious indie-pop into something wounded, widescreen and romantic. So how does he feel about that mission statement now?
“Like, what is a classic album?” Manning wonders. “Classic albums are different for different people. I don’t know whether it’s a classic or not – it’s not up to me. But I’m really proud of us. I’m really proud of the record. Personally, in my heart, it’s a classic. It’ll always be there for me, whether I’m in love with it or if I’m hating it.”
These are the words of someone who has grown up and perhaps become more thoughtful over the past couple of years, a reality that the darkly emotive, melodically incisive ‘Masquerade’ reflects at every opportunity. Manning’s mix of granular storytelling and stark imagery has only become more deftly realised since the release of their self-titled EP in 2024, with intuitive guitar flourishes and surprising rhythmic shifts decorating nuanced, adventurous indie-rock songs that steer clear of easy answers.
Whether they’re turning over the fractures in a relationship or the smouldering embers of political disquiet, Cardinals are steadfast in one of their foundational aims: to capture “a whole spectrum of feeling” in the band’s music, shying away from nothing. “The EP was wanting to be a pop-noise band – fun songs that we liked,” Manning reflects. “In evolving and writing the record, the realisation I came across was that vulnerability might be the only valuable thing when it comes to creating art. If you can keep that honesty throughout your music, that’s what’s going to make it good.”
That these soul-searching creative leaps were able to occur while the rest of their world was being tilted off its axis – the buzz generated by their early work thrusting the band from local club shows to a first headline tour and eye-catching slots opening for Kings of Leon and Fontaines D.C. – is likely testament to the fact that growing up together is something Cardinals have always done.
Euan’s brother, Finn, plays accordion in the band, and his cousin, Darragh, is the drummer. Guitarist Oskar Gudinovic and bassist Aaron Hurley, meanwhile, are school friends from back home in Kinsale. When Euan first moved to Cork in the autumn of 2022, he was just another college kid without much to do, spending hours wandering and thinking. “I didn’t have anywhere to go, so I was always in the city,” he recalls. Everyone else was in a similar boat. The band came together as those old faces started to look at home in new surroundings, a dynamic that hasn’t left them. Years later, those formative relationships have been a grounding force as they’ve spent their early twenties on the road, developing as musicians and changing as individuals under the glare of stage lights. “The support appears when people need it,” Manning notes. “You learn when to leave someone alone, and when you can have a bit of craic with them.”
As a piece, ‘Masquerade’ isn’t short on this kind of emotional intelligence. It’s telling that, alongside Lou Reed, Shane MacGowan and authors such as Kevin Barry, Patrick McCabe and Frank O’Connor, Manning cites Elliott Smith as an influence, given the way he leaves space for the listener to find something of themselves in his writing, providing an outlet by embracing both thematic ambiguity and narrative specifics. He’s happy for people to fall in alongside the narrator on ‘Barbed Wire’ as they walk “from City Hall to George’s Quay”, but what they turn over in their minds as their boots meet the Cork pavement is for them to decide.
“I don’t write hit pieces. I write stories” – Euan Manning
“Songwriters get, ‘Who’s this about, your ex-girlfriend?’ Scriptwriters, painters don’t,” Manning points out. “I always felt that was unfair. It disregards the songwriter as a writer – like you’re just opening your heart and pouring it out. As much as this comes from a personal place, I like to think these aren’t literally about me or any of the lads. I don’t write hit pieces. I write stories.”
Often, those stories hum with anxiety, like there’s a current running beneath their excavations of self and place. Manning traces that back to the real world and Cardinals’ lives being sublimated into their drive to make a record. “The overarching feeling was we need to do this,” he says. “We need to make the record. It has to happen, by whatever means necessary, whatever it takes.”
There is a visceral sense of that urgency in the way Manning’s voice bends and contorts with desperation as he asks “What are you waiting for?” in the title track, its plea becoming fuel for the next hook, the next riff. “It can be a lot to take on board – necessity is a really powerful feeling, and I think you can hear it,” he says. “It adds to the uneasiness.”
This gnawing ambition also creates some friction when Cardinals are viewed within the context of their position as an Irish rock band at a remarkable point in the shared history of Irish rock bands, with Fontaines, Sprints, the Murder Capital, NewDad, Gurriers et al continuing to thrive in the spotlight. As serious as they are about being heard, Manning is equally leery of being swept into a feeding frenzy in the post-Nirvana tradition, with Ireland’s distinct scenes and sounds eventually moulded into a formless nothing by outside hands. “It does sometimes feel like there are hawks circling, looking for younger ones that might have a bit of ambition,” he says. “Like, keep your wits about you.
“There’s always been good Irish music,” he continues. “It’s had a commercial surge now, which is great. People are definitely benefiting, but I don’t like to see us lumped in. Aside from the fact that we’re Irish, I don’t see we have much in common musically with a lot of our contemporaries. We’ve always been pretty insular as a band. We want to do our own thing, which in a way is not nice, because I think there’s value in community. It would be nice to be really friendly with all these Irish bands, always hanging out, but I don’t think it’s in our nature.”
Cardinals’ songs can feel like a rejection of the commodification of Irish culture, presenting a vision of the country that is conflicted and complex. On ‘Masquerade’, the lyric sheet is home to broken Catholic congregations and the threat of bloody-knuckled violence, while even their use of Finn’s accordion is pointed, with the trad instrument’s bittersweet melodic voice eventually recast as a needling, taunting thing on ‘Big Empty Heart’. It’s a world away from an influencer gamely trying to split the G on TikTok. “If it can be digestible, then it can be commercial, and you can make loads of money off it,” Manning observes. “It’s like ‘We’ll take the Guinness, the Aran jumpers, but the political side of it, we’re a lot less into that.’”
Pushing back further against that sanitised reality is their recent single ‘The Burning of Cork’, a squalling track that obliquely frames an episode from the Irish War of Independence, when the Auxiliaries led retaliation to an IRA ambush by setting the city ablaze, against the horrors unfolding in Gaza. Its repetition of “again and again and again” is abrasive, almost nihilistic. “There’s a strong link, I believe, between what happened in Ireland and what’s happening in Gaza, but it’s more extreme over there,” Manning says. “That song is about a few different things, but if people are going to pick up on something, that’s a good way of looking at it.”
In the spring, Cardinals will start touring again, taking songs born and raised in Cork out into the world to see how they fare in new surroundings. Before that, Manning will spend a few weeks working his way back into being at home, taking stock of the small things that add up to big changes in a place’s character. Then, he’ll doubtless weigh them against the reflection he sees in the mirror each morning. “The city moves on without you,” he says. “Maybe I’m starting to lose a bit of how connected I was when I first came here, when I was young. I’m trying to come to terms with that.”
But, as he seeks to do so, there are others in Cork and cities like it across the world living Manning’s old life, finding their way, figuring it out. Cardinals feel like the perfect band for that moment, when some things fall into place, and others fall apart. If ‘Masquerade’ is to be remembered as a classic by anyone, anywhere, it’ll start there. “As soon as the record is out, it’s no longer mine,” he says. “People say that all the time, but I think it’s true.”
Cardinals’ ‘Masquerade’ is out on February 13 via So Young Records.
Listen to Cardinals’ exclusive playlist to accompany The Cover below on Spotify or on Apple Music here.
Words: Huw Baines
Photography: Xander Lewis
Photography Assistance: Lilah Culliford
Glam/Styling: Olivia Creighton
Label: So Young Records