Words and Photos by Lulú Rodriguez
Welcome to our second round of Coffee Date. This time we’re with Euan and Finn from the Irish band Cardinals. After the band played two shows in the city for the release of their debut album Masquerade, we chatted about life on tour, their new album, ghosts, guitar cases, bridges, and Carly Rae Jepsen.
Hey, thanks for hanging out with me today. What’s a perfect night or day out for you? Whether that’s back in Cork or New York or if it’s just a day on tour.
Finn: We like to find bridges in whatever cities we’re in and hang out at the bridge, have a chill by the bridges.
Euan: Maybe get some food.
Finn: There’s this bridge in Cork we go to a lot called North Gate Bridge. It’s next to the cinema, so sometimes we go into the cinema and then we go to the bridge. Or sometimes we start on the bridge and then we go to the cinema. There’s a lot of great bridges in New York that I like. I particularly like the Williamsburg Bridge and the Brooklyn Bridge.
Euan: There’s ghosts there as well at the North Gate Bridge.
Really?
Euan: Yeah, supposedly. So a paranormal investigation is a fun thing to do as well.
Do you do that?
Euan: Sometimes.
Do you believe in ghosts?
Euan: We were talking about ghosts last night.
Finn: You saw a ghost in Cork.
At the bridge?
Euan: No, a different place. A town called Ballyvourney.
Finn: At an old school, right?
Lulu: What did it look like?
Euan: A priest.
Do you think it tried to tell you something?
Euan: I think he’s cursed to walk the grounds of this school. I think he was maybe involved in clerical abuse.
You know, if you go to the South, specifically New Orleans, they have a lot of ghost stories there.
Finn: These friends of ours in this band called, Been Stellar, they’re going to New Orleans today, and they’re doing a ghost tour. I like ghost tours. There’s a good one where we’re from. In Kinsale, there’s a really good ghost tour.
Euan: I nearly started a ghost tour before, but it kind of never got off the ground. I was gonna be the ghost tour guide with my friend in Galway, but it never got it organized in time. So it was kind of a dream.
When you’re in New York, do you like it here?
Finn: I would say so. We’ve been to a few cities in America, and it was our second time in LA last week. The first time we were in LA, we really didn’t like it at all, but this second time we really did like it. I still prefer New York.
Euan: I like New York. But, it’s hard to say. We’ve definitely spent the most time here of all the places in the US and spent most of our time in New York. I do like it a lot. I feel like we haven’t really given a lot of the other cities a chance yet, so I can’t really say whether it’s my favorite.
Finn: I wanna see the South. I’ve been to Austin. Which isn’t really the South, I guess. Technically it is, but it doesn’t feel like it. But I wanna go deep South. I wanna see what that’s like.
Do you have a favorite spot in the city that you like to hang out in?
Finn: Sophie’s!
Do you play pool?
Finn: Yeah, we do. And there’s a great jukebox there. We really like Sophie’s. And we were in this bar yesterday called Donnybrook, which I think is nearby. It was fun. Nice Guinness.
So you’ve been releasing music for some time, but you’ve just put out your debut album. How does it feel to finally have it out there?
Finn: Pretty good. We’re pretty proud of it. But looking on to the next thing now, doing more writing. I’m happy with the album. It feels good to have it out.
Have you been into anything lately—books, films, music—that’s been feeding into what you’re working on next?
Euan: I think everything that we’ve consumed after the recording of the album. So I guess it has been, like, a long time of stuff leading into what we’re gonna be doing next. But I don’t know. I really like all of David Cronenberg’s films.
Is that your accordion right there?
Finn: Yeah. Do you wanna see it?
Sure!
Finn: I don’t know if I should take it out, actually.
Is it annoying to get through security at the airport?
Finn: It is. I often get asked to take it out and play it. I guess it looks kind of like a bomb on an X-ray. So, it always gets pulled, and I always have to get it searched. And then sometimes they ask me to play it. I think it was Boston or Philadelphia, the woman in the TSA asked me to take it out, and she said she hadn’t seen one since she was, like, five or six, an accordion, so she asked me to play. So I played her an Irish waltz.
Do you remember any shows that didn’t go as planned but ended up becoming something you just ran with?
Finn: We played for the President of Ireland, now ex-president, him and a lot of children. He invited us to his house to play. It was fun.
Any funny tour stories you want to share with the class?
Finn: We’ve got this theory that our guitar cases speak to each other at nighttime. And we also have this theory that hotels speak to each other at night when everyone is asleep. When all the guests are asleep in the hotels, the hotels speak to each other, or they have a group chat or something.
And what do they say…do they gossip about the guests?
Euan: Talking about the guests or the city that they live in. Or the cars in the parking lot.
Finn: If hotels had a group chat, all the cars in the parking lot would be like the emojis. Which is something I thought about when I was in Utah.
If they were to talk about you guys, what do you think they’d say?
Finn: About us? They would probably be like, “Hey, there’s five guys here. I wonder what they do. Maybe they are athletes. Maybe that’s what they play.” ‘Cause I feel like they wouldn’t understand the concept of music, hotels. They don’t have ears.
So how do they talk to each other?
Finn: Well, they have mouths. That’s the doors.
Euan: And the eyes are the windows.
Finn: But they don’t have ears. So they can’t listen to our music.
What else talks to each other?
Finn: The guitar cases.
What would your guitar cases/accordion case say to each other about you?
Finn: Well, the accordion case isn’t sentient. It’s not saying anything. But the guitar cases hate each other. We have two guitar cases. The brand is ENKI. They fight at night, ’cause they gotta open up to put the guitars in and it’s like their mouth.
Have you made a little love song or poem about this theory that you have? It’s kind of romantic.
Finn: We just kind of came up with it recently. About The ENKIs. That’s actually a good idea. ‘Cause we, we bought them recently ’cause you can put two guitars in them. They’re helpful for touring. I feel like sometimes when you’re on tour you kind of go insane, so you cope by making up stories about sentient guitar cases. It’s a way to make life a bit more whimsical when it starts to feel mundane.
I saw that your favorite record of 2025 was the Dean Blunt/Elias Ronnenfelt collab. Euan, you specifically mentioned that you were hesitant to listen because of how the sounds would gel, since they’re so distinct from each other. I’m wondering what artist or band you’d want to collaborate with that might surprise people or that you’d be curious about collaborating your songs with?
Finn: Oh, that’s a good question… I don’t know. I feel like, gun to my head, Carly Rae Jepsen. I think she’s got a great voice.
Would you ever try to cover Call Me Maybe?
Finn: Our guitarist really wants to cover that song specifically.
Euan: I think it’d be cool to work with electronic artists, like in the way that Dean Blunt and Elias record was a pretty cool collaboration. There’s lots of really interesting electronic artists right now. I just don’t know if it would work, and I would hate to go and do it with someone that I really liked and for me to end up not liking the music.
If Masquerade was the soundtrack to a movie, what kind of movie would it be?
Euan: Oh, that’s a good question. We’ve probably thought about that subconsciously a bit. Probably some seedy underworld, crime film or something. Like The Pusher films by Nicolas Winding Refn were really big for us when we were making the record. We always liked Taxi Driver and those kind of worlds where it’s really fucked up and everything’s kinda creepy and seedy. So, I guess a film like that would be pretty cool I think.
Finn: Maybe a body horror movie.
Listen to Masquerade