Since emerging with singles “Amsterdam” and “Roseland” in the early 2020s, Cardinals have grown their sound from noisily melodic and traditionally structured indie-rock into something more intriguingly capricious and uncertain. Debut albumMasquerade is a record that stomps and shivers, rages and stutters with vulnerability and a sense of seams unfastening. There are complex feelings to be spilled as the five-piece explore love, faith, suffering and, on “The Burning of Cork”, the lessons and scars of violence once waged on their own city. Finn Manning’s accordion is a potent tool of emotional elaboration, sighing and spiralling amid scratching, jabbing guitars as his singer/guitarist brother Euan considers cycles of brutality (“Anhedonia”) and the torments and dependencies of love (“Big Empty Heart”).Coming from a well-read Irish band, this intense, post-punk-referencing music inevitably draws comparisons to Fontaines D.C. and The Murder Capital. What’s made those two Dublin bands most interesting though is their willingness to evolve and find new things to say and new ways to say them. On the strength ofMasquerade, Cardinals look set to sit comfortably within that tradition.