Cork quintet Cardinals have returned with a gorgeous, directly-to-film music video for “I Like You”, a sweeping highlight from their acclaimed debut album, Masquerade. The visual lands amidst major international touring, mapping out a busy summer of festival appearances, a US tour in September, and an extensive UK and Irish headline run across November 2026. With exclusive vinyl variants of Masquerade already sold out via Rough Trade and Japan’s Big Love, the band is quickly turning global critical buzz into a massive, devoted fanbase.
“I Like You” holds a pivotal place in the band’s catalogue as the very first song written specifically with their debut album in mind. Born during a “bright morning last February” following a prolonged creative drought, the track highlights the band’s gift for blending romanticism with the theatrical melodrama of goth-rock and the brittle honesty of traditional folk. Frontman Euan Manning also revealed a classic jazz nod hidden in the track’s foundation, noting that the opening lyric was playfully paraphrased from the Chet Baker version of the timeless standard “My Funny Valentine.”
He explains,
“This is the first song we wrote with the album in mind, and after a very long period of not working on anything we started and finished this one bright morning last February in our practice studio. The first lyric is stripped/paraphrased from the tune ‘My Funny Valentine’, I don’t think it was written by Chet Baker but that’s the version we know.”
The accompanying music video, directed by Xander Lewis, perfectly mirrors the song’s intimate yet sweeping nature. Shot entirely on a few selective rolls of 16mm and 8mm film, the visual takes inspiration from the raw, documentary-style aesthetics of early 2000s independent cinema like Jordan Melamed’s Manic and Doug Aitken’s Autumn. The result is a casual, spontaneous piece of filmmaking that effortlessly captures the emotional weight of Masquerade, a record carefully split into a vivid, vulnerable A-side and a darker, more volatile B-side.
