There was a time when every mundane indignity of adult life had a corresponding Seinfeld episode. Now those indignities inspire grimly funny Pissed Jeans songs. Demoralized about our dehumanizing healthcare industry? There’s a Pissed Jeans song for that. Depressed about going bald in early adulthood? There’s a Pissed Jeans song ranting about that. Fantasizing about your blowhard project manager’s death? These freaks have a song for you, too.
Two decades into their career, the Pennsylvania-bred punks are the poets laureate of pathetic men flailing against their own obsolescence. (That’s a compliment—to portray a character is not to concern yourself with the character’s likability.) On Half Divorced, their first album in seven years, Pissed Jeans haven’t overhauled their sound or reinvented themselves or “matured” as artists so much as they have amassed a new inventory of modern miseries to turn into scuzz-punk tantrums, from catalytic converter theft (“[Stolen] Catalytic Converter”) to crippling medical debt ("Sixty-Two Thousand Dollars in Debt").
Let other bands address the political and structural causes of late-capitalist decline; with his guttural howl, vocalist Matt Korvette has always been better at sweating the small stuff. He’s in fine form on “Helicopter Parent,” yowling about the micromanaging tendencies of bougie parents (“Why ya breathing down the back of their neck!?”) over a sludge-metal riff that oozes like overflowing sewage. It may be the funniest song about parenting since Randy Newman’s “Love Story (You and Me).” The band further indulges its comedic side on “Everywhere Is Bad,” an amusingly specific travelogue of ills. The playful call-and-response segment—enumerating different cities and the reasons they suck (“Philadelphia/Trashy streets/San Francisco/There’s no more freaks!”)—evokes the humor-infused punk of the Dead Milkmen more than any hardcore reference points.
If Half Divorced has a claim at being Pissed Jeans’ funniest album, it’s not their most musically stimulating. “Helicopter Parent” and “Junktime,” a half-spoken yarn about toxic waste fallout, are exceptions—sludgy, slow-burning eruptions that showcase the band’s talent for tension and release, goaded by Korvette’s throat-scraping anti-charisma. The rest of the record plays it relatively straight, with quick and dirty hardcore outbursts like “Killing All the Wrong People” and “Alive With Hate” that summon plenty of bludgeoning energy but little in the way of memorable riffs or refrains.
The last two tracks evoke a kind of aggro pop-punk: a cover of “Monsters” by undersung Florida punks Pink Lincolns and an uncharacteristically anthemic original, “Moving On.” The latter sounds like it could be a straightforward divorce song until you read the lyrics and realize it’s about a guy swearing off selling his used underwear online. Maybe that’s the album’s unifying theme—trying to cling to your dignity in the world that capitalism has wrought.
Pissed Jeans are fortysomethings now, with day jobs and families of their own. Presumably, any glamour associated with playing in a moderately successful punk band has long since evaporated; they’re still doing it because they still mean it. On “Cling to a Poisoned Dream,” Korvette satirizes the self-delusions of the creative class, people sabotaging their mental and financial health in hopes of making it big. “I know you never got yours/Maybe one day I’ll get mine,” he shouts over pummeling power chords. “Yeah, I’m still clinging to this poisoned dream.” It’s quintessential Pissed Jeans: acerbic and untempered, mocking the masochism it takes to keep a punk band going in 2024, even as they do exactly that.
