Joyce Manor are turning the pathetic into a party
California’s venerated pop-punk champions are cracking jokes and contemplating the eternal abyss on their most fun record in a long time.
Joyce Manor frontman Barry Johnson is a wreck on the band’s seventh LP I Used To Go To This Bar. He’s broke, parsing through the shrapnel in his drug-addled brain, and at one point flatly says that he wishes he “would fucking die”.
“I relate to that partially,” Johnson tells me over a Zoom call, grinning. “But not entirely. It’s definitely zhuzhed up a little bit.”
Would you expect anything less from a band who almost named an album The Nora Jonestown Massacre? Out January 30, I Used To Go To This Bar is wrapped in pervasive dark humour — one song depicts a robbery at a cannabis store, another involves smoking hash with an opossum fresh out of prison — but it doesn’t come at the expense of earnestness.
“Some of the lines remind me of The Vandals or something, where it’s funny but it’s about something,” bassist Matt Ebert says. “It’s not comedy rock1 but the jokes are pretty brutal. They make me laugh.”
In many ways, I Used To Go To This Bar is a classic Joyce Manor: it spans just 15 minutes over nine tracks and, as guitarist Chase Knobbe explains, “for the most part, it’s stuff we’ve touched upon before, just a little bit more refined”.
But the band feels revitalised working with some fresh collaborators. The album features three session drummers, and is the first project with producer Bad Religion co-founder Brett Gurewitz, who has been the band’s boss and biggest champion for a decade as owner of Epitaph Records.
“He had a huge influence on the way the record came out,” Johnson says of Gurewitz. Ebert adds: “Brett’s recording style makes it feel more intentional and confident.”
There’s an immediacy on the record that sounds like signature Gurewitz. ‘The Opossum’ takes the urgency of the band’s punkier earlier days, tries on some rockabilly, and thunders at speed under the guidance of session drummer Joey Waronker, punched in sometime before he hit the road with Oasis.
“Brett would have ideas for specific drummers that he wanted to bring in for specific songs and his ideas, to me, seem so lofty,” Ebert says. “He’s like, ‘Oh, I’m gonna get this guy, Joey Waronker, who’s an absolute legend and incredible drummer’, and then Brett would hit him up, and he would be available and there the following week.”
Having drummers rotate through the album is a natural place for Joyce Manor to land. After turning over three drummers in a decade, the band brought in Motion City Soundtrack’s Tony Thaxton to record on 2022’s 40 oz. to Fresno (“We’ve had so many goddamn drummers over the years”, Johnson said at the time, presumably exasperated). Widening the net made sense though, as Knobbe says, it came with trade-offs.
“It’s really probably, all in, three or four hours you spend playing music with somebody, and then they just go … so I don’t think we necessarily hit a flow,” he says. “But that keeps things exciting and spontaneous, because you’re showing somebody a song they’ve never heard before, and they are playing it with coaching through headphones from Brett in the other room.”
The journey to getting Gurewitz overseeing the record began at a landmark moment for Joyce Manor: a sold-out January 2023 show to 13,500 at their hometown Long Beach Arena with PUP and Jeff Rosenstock. At the show, Gurewitz became “excited and inspired” for Joyce Manor to record a “radio song” after a conversation with Los Angeles rock radio heavyweight Miles Anzaldo of the station KROQ.
“I was like, ‘I don’t really know it means to make a radio song’ and I was not interested,” Johnson says. He put the idea to the side, only revisiting it after finishing a draft of the song which became lead single ‘All My Friends Are So Depressed’.
“I threw together a demo and sent it to Brett and was like, ‘Do you want to go in and record this?’”
One song became another, and suddenly Joyce Manor had the first full-length produced by Gurewitz since Rancid’s Tomorrow Never Comes in 2023. And ‘All My Friends Are So Depressed’ made it to radio.2
I Used To Go To This Bar arrives at a curious time for Joyce Manor. Between albums, their seminal third album Never Hungover Again celebrated its tenth anniversary in 2024 and received a well-deserved victory lap in the press. A few years prior, their startling, scuzzy self-titled debut reached the same milestone and was similarly feted. For many bands, a juncture like this would be when questions of ageing out start to creep up on them.
“I try not to dwell on it. I think it’s a conversation ender,” Johnson says. “Like, when I hang out with some of my friends and certain friends are just fixated on the fact that they’re old, which I think I’m guilty of doing sometimes, but I’m really trying to not lean into that, because it gets really dull.
“But the kids are wrong about a lot of shit. The kids wear JNCOs and like the Deftones, and they’re never gonna convince me that that’s fucking cool.3 That makes me feel old.”
Still, there’s a distinct lack of self-consciousness permeating I Used To Go To This Bar. Since the rapid-fire success of Joyce Manor’s first few albums, the band has often worked in the shadow of their own greatness — 2016’s Cody was (I’d say unfairly) dragged as “cynical” and commercially-minded, while 2018’s Million Dollars to Kill Me and 2022’s 40 oz. to Fresno feel caught between two eras of a young punk band and maturing rock act. On their latest effort, Joyce Manor are simply having fun.
That’s epitomised on ‘Well, Whatever It Was’, a song that Johnson describes as a “Shrek-esque soundtrack jam”. It’s jaunty, poppy, and its touchstones are a roll call of Californian rock icons: Beach Boys, Red Hot Chili Peppers and Weezer.
Sealing the deal is the music video — a send-up of the Great British Bake Off directed by Californian legend Lance Bangs, whose filmography spans Jackass, George Harrison, Nirvana and Björk. As Ebert explains, the connection came through Epitaph Records.
“We had a really exciting text thread going for a while where everyone was just like, ‘Yeah, that’s awesome, let’s do that. That’s fucking cool, let’s do that.’ And then it just snowballed, and Lance made it happen, because he’s such a pro,” he says.
As is the case in many conversations with Barry Johnson, we go on a detour to further discuss Weezer. An ardent admirer of frontman Rivers Cuomo, Johnson is in many ways an heir apparent: they write songs in a similar way, stockpiling and reconstructing sharp turns of phrase until it forms a cohesive patchwork of music, and they’ve both forged an unlikely career on their own terms.
“In the beginning, I was like, ‘Man, is this irresponsible to be starting touring at 24? I should get some hirable skills instead of just partying my ass off in a pop-punk band’,” Johnson says. “But I’m glad I did. It’s worked out.”
‘I Used To Go To This Bar’ by Joyce Manor is out January 30 via Epitaph Records. Pre-save the album here.
‘Close’, Barry interjects.
“it is pretty crazy that [Brett[ did manage to get it on KROQ, just like, willed that into being. It's pretty crazy,” Barry says.
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Phenomenal read on how Joyce Manor's evolved beyond that self-conscious shadow thing. The bit about Johnson zhuzhing up his own wrekedness totally captures how the best punk articulates feeling rather than performing it. Had a similar realizaton watching smaller bands try too hard to be "deep" when Joyce Manor's just owning the absurdity now.