Irish newcomers Cardinals on faith, family and the scars of British violence: ‘It’s shocking to think that could have gone on in your city’

The Irish rock band Cardinals were playing a gig at London’s Moth Club last year when frontman Euan Manning – about to kick off their song “The Burning of Cork” – remarked on a portrait of Winston Churchill hanging backstage along with the venue’s array of British army memorabilia. “Some guy in the crowd was like, ‘Whoop!’” his brother, accordionist Finn, says with a groan. “Poor English kid,” Euan murmurs. Talk about not reading the room.

Awkward moments aside, Cardinals are enjoying their position at the forefront of Ireland’s burgeoning cultural renaissance. With Fontaines DC’s Grian Chatten among their prominent champions, the band are now on the cusp of releasing their debut album, Masquerade – it’s a smart, bold record that examines themes of faith, identity, love and brutality. “We would have preferred to release fewer singles, to be honest, and leave a little more mystery there,” Euan says drily. “But the industry has its say as well.”

He first formed Cardinals as a teenager with school friends Oskar and Aaron, and cousin Darragh, while Finn was at college in Galway playing in his own groups. By the time Finn came home, Cardinals was a fully fledged endeavour. “I think I was the manager for one night after three pints,” Finn recalls, making his brother snort. Eventually, Euan came to him and asked him to write an accordion part for what would turn into their early single, “Roseland”. We’re speaking over video call; the brothers are talking from separate rooms while staying near the Old Head of Kinsale, Co Cork. They share a dark, surly intensity – Euan’s gaze is hawkish under thick black brows – but they make for warm, engaging conversation.

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Finn learnt to play the accordion after being sent to trad music lessons as a kid, before he temporarily abandoned the accordion in favour of teaching himself the guitar. When he returned to it, it was with a new love of rock music, and he was determined to work out how to transfer those sounds onto the instrument. You hear it in the clamorous opening of “Over at Last”, or zigzagging frantically on the thrashy “Anhedonia”, which has a chaotic trad bent to it. “We’re conscious not to try and have the accordion front and centre, because it does have a very distinct sound,” Finn explains. “I think there’s a wrong way to go about using one where you can butcher it and end up sounding like something you don’t want to.”

They clearly have a strong vision for the band. Euan initially set out performing in a post-punk shout but now sings in a slouchy, melodic drawl that falls somewhere between Lou Reed and Michael Stipe. “It’s funny, someone said to me recently that my vocal style’s either very close to folk music or very close to pop-punk,” he says. “I think you can imitate stuff for a while and try to be something you’re not, and then when you finally land on what you want to be, the other stuff that you tried before just is so absurd. It makes no sense to you anymore.”

Euan is as influenced by literature, art and history as he is by other music. The song “St Agnes” takes its name from a stained glass work by the Irish arts and crafts artist Harry Clarke, while his conversational tone and Chekhovian songwriting is informed by writers such as Frank O’Connor and Kevin Barry – but also films like Mike Leigh’s Naked or Nicolas Winding Refn’s Pusher trilogy. There’s something of Nick Cave’s murder ballad “Stagger Lee” in their song “Anhedonia” – sparked by a violent incident Euan witnessed – as the frontman sings from the perspective of a troubled, disillusioned narrator (“I know I’m not the only one who suffers/ Suffer I have done”). Perhaps a tad less shocking, though, he agrees: “You’ve got to be brave to go that far and make it work. A lot of people could try to write something as brash and violent as ‘Stagger Lee’, but they’d probably fail.”

Faith, worship and guilt filter through the band’s songs like sunlight through that stained glass of “St Agnes”. Euan sings in a dry croak on the forlorn title track: “Worth your waiting soul/ If you’re lonely, that’s my fault/ You can’t bundle faith/ It will dry like hate.” On “Over at Last” he asks, “Don’t you think I’m holy?/ The way the cross is on my neck.” The brothers were raised Catholic, but their dad stopped taking them to mass when they were still children, after the Murphy Report published findings from an investigation into the sexual abuse scandal in the archdiocese of Dublin. “It really shocked my dad,” Finn says. “He still gets angry about it, about the power the church abused over the world but especially in Ireland.”

A different kind of anger rages on “The Burning of Cork”, with Finn’s cacophonous, jangling accordion reminding Euan of the piano on The Stooges’ “I Wanna Be Your Dog”. Initially, he feared the song was too heavy compared to the rest of the record. “The first time we played it, I was like, ‘Shut it down’, thinking it didn’t fit,” he says. “But the more we played it, we got comfortable with the idea of it being one that sticks out.”

It’s somewhat fitting, given Cork’s own architecture still bears the scars of the British forces’ destruction in 1920. “It’s really shocking to think that could have gone on in your city,” Euan says, drawing a parallel, as many Irish artists do, to the situation in Gaza. Perhaps this explains the ambiguity of the song: “We get the sentiment/ As you brought a city built and burnt/ Again, you pretend it’s all her/ And it hurts and you have learned.” It leaves a strong impression. Cardinals know how to make their mark.

‘Masquerade’, the debut album from Cardinals, is out on 13 February. The band are on tour in the UK and Ireland from 5 March.