Tracksuited, denim and leather clad and hidden behind wrap-around sunglasses, the Cork five-piece, Cardinals, look like they’ve just stepped out of Warhol’s factory in Midtown Manhattan rather than the picturesque village of Kinsale, and yet to live in a Cardinals song is to be surrounded by a grainy, monochromatic landscape that holds both a gritty rock and roll nostalgia and the rolling hills of Ireland’s traditional musical past. Their pogues-leaning, shanty-esque verses swoon into room-filling chorus’, and often cloak dark and brooding tales of love in gentle first-person conversational narratives. Their critically acclaimed debut EP Cardinals, is an eclectic gothic amalgam of shoegaze, pop, Irish trad folk, and rock which incorporates 60s Wall of Sound and poetry inflected punk.