Almost a decade and a half after they took basements and Tumblrs across America by storm with a raucous, self-flagellating singalong about avoiding your crush at a party, Joyce Manor have continued to mine everyday indignities for pop-punk gold. They’ve evaded the corniness and juvenility that have soured later-career records from some of their biggest inspirations. Instead, the Los Angeles band’s seventh album falls more in line with DIY lifers like PUP, Jeff Rosenstock, the Menzingers, and Los Campesinos!—all of whom have spent their last few records using gruff, rowdy pop-punk as a conduit to interrogate the genre’s inherent immaturity. They’re exploring the tension between outgrowing the scene and feeling like too much of a fuckup for anywhere else.
As the title suggests, I Used to Go to This Bar is made up of songs about feeling things you thought you were too old to feel and coping by doing shit you’re probably too old to do—sleeping well into the afternoon, getting too drunk or too stoned (at times it feels like the album could be called Hungover Again). Since their 2011 debut, Joyce Manor have strayed little from the formula that’s made them one of the most consistent contemporary punk bands, filtering depths-of-despair angst through sticky guitar melodies and fist-pumping rhythms. There’s a reason you couldn’t go to a house show between 2014 and 2019 without hearing a “Constant Headache” cover. A Joyce Manor tune can get an adrenaline-spiking circle pit going just as easily as it can snap the heartstrings of card-carrying emo kids, and it can do it all in under two and a half minutes.
Their songs have a way of leveling the playing field between tiny frustrations that make up a run-of-the-mill bad day and life-altering tragedies that render previous bad days unmemorable. The tuxedo T-shirt-clad Sisyphus who narrates “Well, Whatever It Was” mentions getting hit by a car as just one mishap in “the worst day ever so far” and seems more inconvenienced by the wait at the ER. His comedic inability not to get screwed over by circumstance gives way to a final verse that hits more like a gut-punch than a punchline: “As the darkness was surrounding/And my heart began a-pounding/You could feel the tension mounting/And it never did break.” “All My Friends Are So Depressed,” while chugging along with its swaggering bassline and Rivers Cuomo-meets-Morrissey self-deprecation, isn’t quite as affecting, occasionally suffering from overly simplistic lyrics that, at their best, reflect the dull pain of losing passion for something you once loved.
The depressive shadow that looms over I Used to Go to This Bar is more interesting when it manifests in less obvious ways—an angry outburst in a weed dispensary just before the vein-popping chorus of “I Know Where Mark Chen Lives,” or a fever dream about getting high with an opossum who’s got a “prison past”—or in moments where mortality creeps in as more than just a tossed-off aside. The title track sounds like your typical pop-punk daydream about idyllic times with a lost love (“Time goes by so slowly baby/I wish you were here,” goes the sunny chorus). The fact that the narrator’s object of affection has died doesn’t come up until halfway through, alongside a detail about missing the funeral.
Closer “Grey Guitar” presents a character named Danielle as a sort of Schrödinger’s cat. “I think Danielle’s dead,” Johnson yelps. “I mean, she might be alive.” He delivers a panicked, preemptive eulogy, assuming the worst, while refusing to venerate or vilify Danielle in (maybe) death. “One day they’ll come to get you/And expose what’s in your heart,” he sings. “Some say they did depict you/As though you were a star.” “Grey Guitar” feels like a spiritual successor to “Heated Swimming Pool,” the wandering lament that closed out Never Hungover Again, during which Johnson remarked, “I wish you would’ve died in high school/So you could be somebody’s idol.” Over a decade later, he’s still contending with the ways memory can flatten those who are no longer around to speak for themselves.
Nostalgia itself isn’t embarrassing, but our need for it is. Romanticization of the past is a fleeting antidote for dissatisfaction with the present, and the glory days never seem quite glorious until you’re remembering them. Johnson even admits that there’s “nothing special” about the titular bar, that any bar would do: “Just pour some old beer on the carpet, and make it close to my apartment.” By now the nostalgia cycle has turned Tumblr’s heyday and the “Defend Pop Punk” era into moodboard fodder for people a few years too late to experience it in real time; thankfully, Joyce Manor’s legacy goes beyond that. Songcraft is still their priority, and their moments of indulgence are not without self-awareness or criticism. On the aching “Falling Into It”—which might be Joyce Manor’s first unambiguous love song—Johnson sings, “I’ve been taking notes on the finer things you do.” Missing them is inevitable either way.
