Cork six-piece group Cardinals have today announced their first ever headline tour with gig all across Ireland and the UK.

The Cardinal's debut headliner tour will take place this May and includes dates in Cork, Galway and Limerick.

Today's announcement is also accompanied by a shiny new single announcement in the form of the band's new track 'Unreal'.

'Unreal' acts as the group's much-anticipated follow-up to last year's debut single proper, "Roseland", a song saw them heralded across press for the maturity and fully-formed nature of their sound.

The 7" vinyl, released on tastemaker label So Young, went on to hurriedly sell out within only two hours of its announce.

Following the huge success of this single- 'Unreal' sees the rock outfit back with a bang. Their new track is a melodic rock ditty and reminds listeners of what it is to be young and swooning.

Front man Euan Manning says of the new single that: "Unreal was written in the back of a Ford Transit van that I happened to be living in at the time. It reminds me of warm days spent on the beaches at home back in Cork. I remember learning a Beach Boys song, taking one of the chords from it, and building a whole new song, this one, around it."

Listeners can hear that nostalgic Beach Boys quality but 'Unreal' never veers into the saccharine either. It's a perfectly balanced piece of sentimental rock.

Check out Cardinals new single 'Unreal' below:

The Cardinals started out on the fringes of Cork's live music scene: "we were into what we were hearing but knew we could never be part of it, we wanted to juxtapose ourselves," says front man Euan Manning.

Continuing he says: not for the sake of doing something different but because we have pop-leaning influences and didn’t want to shy away from that."

Since their outsider Origins the band have gone on to perform at Other Voices, been named as one of Fontaine D.C.'s Grian Chatten's "favourite new bands" on BBC Radio 1 and are billed to play at the South by South West Music Festival in Texas next month.

Cardinal's 2024 UK and Ireland headliner dates: 

9th May - Hare & Hounds, Birmingham
11th May - Yes (Basement), Manchester
12th May - McChullis, Glasgow
14th May - The Windmill, London
15th May - The Joiners, Southampton
16th May - The Great Escape, Brighton
24th May - Róisín Dubh, Galway
25th May - Kasbah Social Club, Limerick
26th May - Cyprus Avenue, Cork