Cardinals: the Cork indie band set on writing future classics

Euan Manning pauses for a moment, mulling over what he wants to achieve next. “Album,” Cardinals’ guitarist and vocalist says, before pausing again. “Classic album,” he adds. Then, there’s one more pause. “Classic Cork album.”

By his estimation there hasn’t been one of those in decades, probably since the Sultans of Ping put out ‘Casual Sex in the Cineplex’ in 1993. There’s plenty of youthful piss and vinegar going on here as Manning and bassist Aaron Hurley bat questions back and forth during a morning Zoom call.

But, as green as they are, Cardinals do have the makings of a serious band – the sort of band who might write an album that continues to reverberate long after they’ve split up or got shit or whatever else they might do.

They’re also a Cork band to their bones. Manning’s lyrics – tales of hope and loss and love and failure – live on the streets of the southern Irish city. “I’ve always found that wherever I am has a big impact or influence on me, on how I live and how I’m feeling,” he says. “Cork might be far smaller than Dublin or New York or London, but I think it has so much character packed into it. It feels very real.”

Cardinals’ recent single, the sublime almost-waltz ‘Roseland’, was a low-lit stumble through lives lived in parallel to Manning’s own. “I went down to MacCurtain Street Station, where I first said my last goodbye,” it begins, his voice almost a low hum. Now, if you are predisposed to a certain sort of wordy romanticism, this really is the stuff. “This is gonna sound like some cliché ‘Paddy’ shit now, but I think that storytelling is an Irish thing, an Irish tradition,” Manning says. “So maybe it’s just in my blood, you know?”

But Cardinals’ palette – halfway between the atmospheric bluster of Echo and the Bunnymen and the scratchy indie of Yo La Tengo – is also perfectly suited to amping up the drama in the everyday. Emerging from behind Hurley’s morose bass intro, ‘Roseland’ is lit up by pirouetting accordion lines, performed by Manning’s brother, Finn, while his voice is eventually overtaken by surging, squalling melodies from guitarists Kieran Hurley and Oskar Gudinovic. It’s the sort of thing that sits on your chest with a syrupy heaviness. “Texturally, the accordion is something we want to pursue,” Manning says. “We have ambitions to run it through pedals and really make it fucked up if we can.”

Cardinals’ members are all in their early 20s now – some of them met at school in Kinsale, a small town popping with colour 20 miles or so south of Cork – having come together as a band once they had migrated to the city for college. Songs percolating, they reached out to drummer Darragh Manning to solidify an early four-piece configuration of the band. “We just started gigging in the small venues there,” Manning says.

Quickly, they found that their melody-heavy approach set them apart from their peers, and the codified Dublin post-punk sound. “Like, if you’re from Cork, you really don’t want to be from anywhere else,” Manning says. “And you really don’t pay too much attention to what people are doing, certainly in Dublin. That mindset influenced this idea that we have to do our own thing. We were listening to the Beach Boys and the Shangri-Las. I remember our first few shows being really shit – the songs were there but we couldn’t play them.”

But that would change. Late in 2022, Cardinals released ‘Amsterdam/The Brow’, a noisy, atmospheric single that seemed to sketch in pencil the plans they’d ink in with ‘Roseland’. Manning was immediately stoked with the progress it represented, but Hurley recalls being met with a slow-burn reaction that, perhaps advantageously, allowed them to grow further before following it up. “I was happy with the songs, but they didn’t really go past the Cork scene for months and months and months,” he says.

The band’s new single, ‘Unreal’, is a ragged gem that came into being as Manning messed around with a chord lifted from a Beach Boys song in the back of a transit van. It’s the latest missive from sessions with producer Richie Kennedy, who came up as an engineer at Flood and Alan Moulder’s Assault & Battery Studios in London, and introduces fizzing jangle-pop into their repertoire. “We never want to get comfortable,” Hurley says.

“I think you want to be out of your comfort zone as much as you can,” Manning adds. “I’d hate to think that we’ve become lax and settled into something. It’s good to have a sound, obviously, but we want to keep pushing forward. There’s a whole spectrum of feeling – and I want to capture that.”

Cardinals’ new single ‘Unreal’ is out now via So Young Records

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