The freedom of jankiness: Cardinals on the mistakes and humanity that made their debut
There are mistakes on Cardinals’ debut album. After a lifetime of building towards a release, the brothers Euan and Finn Manning, their cousin Darragh Manning and their lifelong friends Oskar Gudinovic and Aaron Hurley, have unleashed something full of purposeful flaws.
Never has anyone summed up the process of creation as simply and succinctly as when accordion player Finn Manning said, “Aaron played the wrong note in the chorus, and it was actually right.” Sitting around a wooden pub table, he can still remember the exact fuck up.
It was a gig in Utrecht at EKKO back in January 2025. After playing the same rousing show that’s made audiences fall into obsession with them, they did the admin most bands now have to do post-gig: the somewhat embarrassing process of sitting on their phones and reposting Instagram stories. “We listened back on somebody’s Instagram story, and were like, ‘that’s wrong, but it actually sounds quite good.’”
And just like that, their track ‘Big Empty Heart’ changed. A bum note made the song great.
That story alone may as well be the genesis of Cardinals. It speaks to their beginnings as drummer Darragh Manning remembers an early run through of the track as the first time he thought, ‘Wait, we’re good.’ Finn remembers hearing it live before he was in the band, recalling, “I was in another band at the time, and one night I went and saw them play, and I’d seen them play before, but there was a certain gig that I saw and I was like, ‘Okay, well, that’s, like a fully formed, proper band there.’” After that, he asked to join.
For singer and songwriter Euan, it’s also a track that seemed to represent something special, as it was kept from earlier projects. They never quite nailed it in the studio to live up to how precious the track was, or how good they knew it could be. So it was harboured as a kind of secret, only unleashed when it was time – and their debut, Masquerade, is that time.
A core element of Cardinals is the knowledge that a mistake can be perfection. All of their musical backgrounds feed into that. Darragh started in jazz bands, Finn played in folk units or trad music, while Euan was in metal bands. All of it requires a trust in spontaneity and improvisation, which has undeniably contributed to the Cardinals’ dedication to never messing with the energy.
Not even an iconic studio would mess with the group’s vibrations as the band landed in the UK at the famed RAK studios to record. In a building that intimidating, and still only a new name, the temptation to simply slip into how things are usually done must be high. But instead, Cardinals swiftly shut off any commonplace click track.
“As a live band that doesn’t use any ears or clicks or anything, it just felt natural to do it that way,” Finn said. While it’s pretty standard for bands to record to a metronome, keeping them in time, or play gigs with a beat, keeping them in place in their ears, Cardinals instead thrive off “a sense of urgency”, letting them speed up or slow down if the energy calls them to.
Again, it all stems from their origins. “If you look at a lot of orchestral music or like music that doesn’t use a click, it has so much more energy,” Darragh said, busting myths about his musical background that might be perceived as more ‘traditional’. For all of them, one band in particular is an influence here, as Finn said, “We’re definitely not the first to do it, and we definitely take inspiration from the likes of The Pogues when it comes to keeping a certain amount of jankiness.”
In the modern age of AI and hyper-polished digital works, that ‘jankiness’ feels more and more essential. It’s proof of real hands and real minds and real people, as Finn said, as a bottom line, especially as fans of true rock and roll, “for a rock record, especially, you want that sense of humanity.”
Masquerade has plenty of that, from the mistakes that made it even better, to the myriad of influences that can truly only come from real people, and real friends, sharing anything from Nine Inch Nails, to Berlin-period-Bowie, to Townes Van Zandt, to some good trad down at the local. But overwhelmingly, what gives the band’s debut its humanity is their staunch refusal to be boxed in.
Before chatting with the band, I’m warned of things I shouldn’t say. In particular, though the band are obviously proud to be Irish and are endlessly inspired by Irish musical heritage, they don’t like being lumped in as an ‘Irish band’ amid culture’s sudden obsession with them. They also don’t like the lyrics of their songs being discussed as if they’re all revelatory, real-life stories. The reason for both? It’s reductive, and Cardinals are not about to be reduced.
Look up any number of reviews or features about them, and you’ll see constant futile attempts to genre-align them, throwing out words like indie, punk, folk, trad and so on. When joking around about a recent trip to a record store, we end up talking about albums that are hard to find simply because you don’t know what category they’d fall into – Cardinals want to be like that. But if you have to give them one label, they’d simply like it to be “rock and roll”.
From there, there is space to evolve and do it all. Their debut is a big deal, “its stature as just like a format that’s been around for so long.” Euan added that they always planned to be an album band and “never really wanted to be releasing, like, three or four EPs before we decided to do an album.” They respect the statement of a debut, with Finn explaining, “A lot of the bands we really like, it’s not about coming out strong commercially, or having an album that does like really well, but it’s a piece of art,” adding that their missing was simply, “A good debut album from a good band – We just wanted to do that.”
But already, they’re moving on, looking forward, making sure that it’s clear now before the debut has already landed that this LP won’t be a box. “As much as we believe in the importance of a debut album. There’s so many bands that we love that didn’t get it, well, not that they didn’t get it right, but their masterpiece is a couple albums in,” Finn said. Again, they won’t be reduced, and while Masquerade is an incredible show of the band as they are, representing them from the bum notes to even the font they custom designed for it, they won’t be held in one place long.
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