Younger Irish indie rockers Cardinals are amongst our favourite new bands of 2025, and their full-length debut Masquerade is about to reach early in 2026. We have already posted a handful of songs that’ll seem on that LP: the title tracok, “Huge Empty Coronary heart,” “The Burning Of Cork.” Right now, they’re hitting us with a brand new one known as “Barbed Wire.”
“Barbed Wire” highlights Cardinals’ use of accordion, which is perhaps the one ingredient that really units the band aside. For essentially the most half, “Barbed Wire” is a cool old-school indie rock tune, bringing a few of that Pixies-style catchy spikiness. (I simply realized that I used the time period “spikiness” to explain a tune known as “Barbed Wire,” which is type of embarrassing. When you can consider a greater descriptor, hearth away.) However the accordion lends it a properly drunken goth-folk impact. These guys may find yourself doing extra for the accordion than anybody since Steve Urkel, or perhaps Madvillain.
Like numerous Cardinals songs, “Barbed Wire” offers with the historical past of Cork, Cardinals’ hometown. In a press launch, frontman Euan Manning says, “It’s extremely a lot impressed by the historical past of our metropolis and the Gaol home that stood on the south gate bridge a few years in the past. Lyrically, I had hoped to evoke pictures of silhouetted metropolis partitions and safety fences. Generally aesthetics can carry a tune from its inception to its completion. Kevin Barry’s novel Metropolis Of Bohane additionally served as inspiration for a gothic re-imagining of Cork.” Try the Xander Lewis-directed “Barbed Wire” video under.
Masquerade is out 2/13 on So Younger.
