Cork five-piece Cardinals have released their debut album Masquerade through So Young Records. Read our full Masquerade album review.
Released on 13 February, the ten-track record follows the band’s self-titled EP and gathers together a sound that has been developing through their early singles and live shows.
Produced by Shrink, mixed by Dani Bennett Spragg and mastered by Felix Davis, Masquerade includes ‘She Makes Me Real’, ‘St. Agnes’, ‘I Like You’, ‘Big Empty Heart’ and the six-minute closer ‘As I Breathe’.
A grassroots band reaching album one
This is exactly the point in an artist’s story that interests us at Imminent Infinity. Debut albums are where years of rehearsals, support slots, small rooms and half-finished ideas finally have to become one coherent statement.
Cardinals are not arriving with decades of mythology attached. That is the appeal. Masquerade is the sound of a band establishing what it wants to be while there is still room for the edges to move.
And in a month dominated by the machinery of the BRIT Awards, there is something refreshing about paying attention to a young guitar band putting album number one into the world.
