Just Mustard Break Noise-Rock Ground on Heart Under

As Heart Under standout “Seed” progresses towards its explosive denouement, a sea of guitars shrouded in phaser and tremolo effects builds a sense of simultaneous rest and unrest that hints at some big-time pressure relief at the song’s end. Ball’s voice likewise maintains an eerie sense of equilibrium even as she starts enunciating her words more urgently and loudly. A quieter stretch gives way to her absolutely wailing atop guitars that shriek and whine like horses let loose in a steel factory, and the fact that this was obviously right around the corner makes it no less powerful. It reminds me of how, no matter how much your anxiety compels you to prepare for some terrible theoretical event, that moment will still feel just as awful as if you hadn’t prepared at all.

“Sore” transforms the expected into the uproarious and liberating just as formidably. Guitars that sound like hellish wind chimes ebb and flow from pared-back to hollering, becoming more fanged with each chorus. After Ball’s vocals reach their most desperate in the final chorus, the guitars take on so much heft they sound more like nuclear alarms than stringed instruments, something akin to the apocalyptic roar of Portishead’s “We Carry On.” The apex of this tension-building approach is “I Am You,” where crawling bass first draws you in and subsequent guitar noise evokes infinitely echoing car brakes. The gradual pace at which this cacophony coalesces into a storm of ever-bending guitars is fully hypnotic, and the maelstrom drives Ball’s most powerful vocal performance. “Change my head!” she repeatedly cries as the sounds under her become increasingly head-swirling and tough to follow. Her fire burns hotter with each yelp, and when the tempest gives way to sparsity, you can feel a weight lift off your chest, as though Ball has exorcised your demons alongside hers.

“I Am You” is the rare Heart Under song where you can reasonably guess what Ball is singing about. “Change my hair / Change my dress / Change my head” suggests a desire to become a different person inside and out; by the time she starts belting the final line over and over, she sounds desperate to free herself of some sort of terrible pain. Elsewhere, she leans into images at once unsettlingly unclear and clearly unsettling. She has often cited dreams as a fascination, and Heart Under’s lyrics are like nightmares in that, even if they make no sense, they still pump fear into your bones and adrenaline into your heart.

On “Still,” Ball sings, “I’m inside it, I have been / Going backward, still sitting,” drawing upon themes of surrender and spiraling. There’s no knowing the exact events she’s describing, but you can feel how little control she has over her surroundings; her band’s gong-like bass plucks and muscular performance emphasize how trapped she feels. “Was waiting for the sun in my hand,” she intones repeatedly on opener “23,” an image equally disturbing and beautiful: All that heat can sustain life and destroy it in equal measure. Then there’s “Mirrors,” which, like “I Am You,” is more vivid: It’s a queasy story of looking in the mirror and seeing someone else, and Ball and Noonan recite it atop overwhelming, yet freeing musical clamor. Or maybe they’re singing about being so disassociated from yourself that you don’t even recognize yourself in the mirror, or maybe it’s a song about body dysmorphia. There are no firm answers in a Just Mustard song—just terror and relief in the sound.

Sometimes, Max Freedman sits and writes about music, and sometimes he just sits. Oh, and sometimes he critiques, too. Follow him on Twitter and find his writing at Pitchfork, The A.V. Club, MTV News, FLOOD, The Creative Independent and, of course, here at Paste.