I didn’t expect a new Joyce Manor album to put me face-to-face with my mortality as a music writer, but then again, they were very responsible for my rebirth as a music writer. I know, I know, I know - the emo revival did not start in 2013, that’s just when people like me and places like Pitchfork were starting to write about it. There’s really no excuse to only hear “Constant Headache” for the first time in 2013, at least no good excuse. All I got is that Stereogum, Rolling Stone, Spin, MTV Hive, etc., none of these places were covering it either and there I was writing feature-length pieces about the second Cults album and reviews of Wavves side projects.
And the fact that I saw Joyce Manor playing to damn near 1000 people in Los Angeles at that time made it possible to convince the higher ups that an actual phenomenon was at play. The same thing happened, to an even greater degree, when I saw The Front Bottoms around that time.
Since then, I have seen Joyce Manor more than any other band and it’s not even close. The diversity and frequency of my Joyce Manor live experiences are the only ways I can claim anything close to jam band cred on Indiecast. I’ve seen them at FYF Fest and Coachella; a train station in Los Angeles, a city where no one uses the train; at Zanzibar in Louisville, which was probably the most hot and humid club I’d been at in my entire life; at the Hollywood Palladium and the Long Beach Arena, and they were headlining, but this year, I’ll probably see them open for Hot Mulligan. That’s only a partial list.
In 2016, certain agents didn’t have their shit together and Modern Baseball/Joyce Manor and The Hotelier/Told Slant gigs were booked to play in Los Angeles the same night. They ended up combining the shows into a Echo/Echoplex double decker, six-band bill and Barry Johnson called it “Ian Cohen fest” during the Joyce Manor set. No one booed!
Beyond that, I might as well be the David Fricke to Barry Johnson’s Bono. I did a Grantland profile of Joyce Manor at the Gable House Bowl in Torrance and then reviewed Never Hungover Again for Pitchfork. Two years later, I reviewed Cody for Spin. Two years after that, a Stereogum Cover Story for Million Dollars to Kill Me. With no new Joyce Manor album on the horizon in 2021, I did a Sunday Review for the self-titled and then, when 40 Oz. to Fresno dropped, I interviewed Barry for UPROXX. And then, to cap everything off (and give the band an opportunity to clarify some things they regretted saying in previous interviews), I did a 10-year anniversary piece on Never Hungover Again for The Ringer at the same place I did the Grantland interview; only now, Gable House Bowl turned into a Bowlero.
So when I got a super-advance promo of I Used to Go to This Bar with the expectation that I’d pitch something on the band, I had to be perfectly honest: there was nothing left for me to do with Joyce Manor and nowhere left to go. Any potential angle for this record - “Joyce Manor have somehow gotten more popular over the past two years!,” “Joyce Manor have made their best album since Never Hungover Again,” “Joyce Manor are growing up!” - is one that I had already used as far back as 2018. At least I could fall back on “I’m in semi-retirement while I’m working on this book” rather than “I need something with more juice if I’m going to be in GQ for the first time.”
Thing is, all of those angles are true of I Used to Go to This Bar and it is also true that it’s an album that should probably put any Joyce Manor fan in touch with their mortality. It’s not just the seventh Joyce Manor album, it comes fifteen years after their first. Meaning that if you were a high schooler on Tumblr when “Constant Headache” dropped, you’re probably in your 30s at this point.
And really, what is the album about, from its title on down, if not coming to terms with the limitations of nostalgia? Or, the futility of comparing your current self to your older one? So, of course I Used to Go to This Bar has an angle…albums ranking list! Because Something On is the only place left where I can still get an immediate green light to write about Joyce Manor.
7. 40 Oz. to Fresno (2022)
A co-worker of mine was recently talking about how she went on a sinful spending spree at Bed Bath & Beyond and my first thought was, “that place still exists?” At this point, I just assume that any 90s chain megastore like Bed Bath and Beyond - if it hadn’t already been pushed to the brink by 2019 - went the way of Circuit City or Toys R Us. I still think they’re lying, from what I can tell, Bed Bath & Beyond closed all their brick and mortars and said they’ll never open another one in California, on some Sunny Day Real Estate shit.
Anyways, there was a similar phenomenon happening with legacy “2010 bands” where if they hadn’t put out a record in 2020 or 2021, I assumed there was a good chance that they took stock during the pandemic and realized it just wasn’t worth it to keep being a real, “brick and mortar” touring band. This was happening with artists way less successful than Joyce Manor, but I also know it was happening with Joyce Manor.
Songs From Northern Torrance, the radical (and radically unpopular) remix of Joyce Manor, this all looked like a band trying to buy time and figure out their next move. If there were any moves to be made. And when I interviewed Barry in 2022, he more or less confirmed that they’d been on hiatus after the Million Dollars tour cycle ended and he started taking community college classes…much like his hero Rivers Cuomo.
Fun fact, I was taking some courses at LA City College when I met Rivers Cuomo in 2013 and it turns out he took some classes there as well (obviously before the whole Harvard thing). I told him I was taking Organic Chemistry and whatever else I needed to fulfill prerequisites to apply to a Didactic Program of Dietetics and then he said, “I took some English classes, I wrote ‘Sweater Song’ in there.” Well…I probably wrote a Bombay Bicycle Club review in mine, so that evens out.
Anyways, 40 Oz. to Fresno is a record that exists because Joyce Manor was one of those bands that somehow got more popular during COVID, just as they somehow got more popular after Million Dollars despite it being viewed as kind of a flop by everyone who lived through Joyce Manor.
Let’s just do some back-of-the-napkin math here: the opener is three minutes long, a veritable epic by Joyce Manor standards, and it’s a cover. “NBTSA” was already five years old by this point, having been released as a Polyvinyl single. “Secret Sisters” dates back to Never Hungover Again, “Don’t Try” was also salvaged from a pile of unfinished tracks and the presence of Rory Phillips in the credits leads me to believe that “Did You Ever Know” and “Reason to Believe” might have been started during the Million Dollars sessions. 40 Oz. to Fresno is 16 minutes long and, if I’m being generous in my accounting, maybe half of that is truly new Joyce Manor music. And it took us four years to get here. Two minutes of music per year, truly artisanal!
I won’t go so far as to say that 40 Oz. to Fresno is cynical, and even if it occupies this spot, it’s still enjoyable when it’s on, even if most of the lyrics have a very “finished in the studio” quality and it has no real flow and “You’re Not Famous Anymore” is way more enjoyable if you know who it’s about (I’ll never tell!). But Joyce Manor should be very grateful they set a standard a decade prior where a 12-minute record is acceptable. Speaking of which…
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