Mannequin Pussy announce a 2024 North America tour in support of their recently announced upcoming album, I Got Heaven, and release a visualizer for their blistering new single “Sometimes.”
“‘Sometimes’ is the internal conversation and subsequent battle that comes with facing your own desires. It is a song about the struggle of feeling a deep need for one’s independence while at the same time accepting that you are longing for someone who would understand you and be enough to draw you away from your solitude. It is the anger you feel at someone for making you feel desire. For allowing that desire to distract you from your work and your self and your mission,” explains Marisa Dabice.
I Got Heaven, due March 1st on Epitaph Records, is the band’s most fully realized LP yet. Over 10 ambitious tracks that abruptly turn from searing punk to inviting pop, the album is deeply concerned with desire, the power in being alone, and how to live in an unfeeling and unkind world. “There’s just so much constantly going on that feels intentionally evil that trying to make something beautiful feels like a radical act ,” says Dabice. “The ethos of this band has always been to bring people together.”
I Got Heaven, an album filled with cathartic tunes about despairing times, is a document of a band doubling down on their unshakable bond to make something furious, thrilling, and wholly alive.
Mannequin Pussy is Colins “Bear” Regisford, Kaleen Reading, Maxine Steen and Marisa Dabice.
WATCH THE “SOMETIMES” VISUALIZER
Early Praise for I Got Heaven:
“When the song’s abrasive verses yield to a sugary power-pop chorus, it’s akin to pressing your face against the air conditioner during a heat wave. That change-up from cathartic punk to dopamine-inducing power-pop is like Dabice reversing the compass from hell to salvation.” -Pitchfork, Best New Track
“Incorporates synths into their sound while sticking firmly to their punk roots… Acts like Mannequin Pussy prove there are still plenty of vital new ideas to be found.” -Rolling Stone
“Grueling and gorgeous” -NPR
“Mannequin Pussy are firing on all cylinders here; the swirl of abrasive sweetness that has characterized this band from the start has rarely sounded better.” -Stereogum, Best Song of the Week
“More modern punk should be this genuinely provocative” -Brooklyn Vegan
“An intimate look into what they have in store: and it’s near perfect. The Philly rockers take you from heaven to hell and then back again, with swirling synths giving way to abrasive, punky distortion”
-Paste
“Chock full of classic punk spirit. It’s got all the power and vinegar you could ever want” -Guitar World
“An absolute rager, with Dabice grappling with ideas of purity and Christian Salvation over pummelling verses that bloom into a gorgeous shoegazy chorus.” -Exclaim!
Following the 2019 release of their critically acclaimed third album Patience, Mannequin Pussy returned in 2021 for their EP Perfect. They toured that release relentlessly and added guitarist Maxine Steen to the band’s official lineup. Where the band members’ personal lives were in transition with breakups, changing living situations, and periods of self-reevaluation, their time together on the road was a grounding and clarifying force. “There was so much going on in our lives that it was the perfect opportunity to recalibrate who we were as people and musicians,” says Regisford. The band changed their entire formula, choosing to write together in Los Angeles with producer John Congleton over slowly crafting tracks at home. “When I’ve written songs, it’s usually a very solitary process,” says Dabice. “So this was shedding a lot of those hermit-like qualities to do something intensively collaborative. Your best work comes when you allow other people into it.”
By December 2022, the band had 17 new songs written with Congleton in Los Angeles. “Everyone felt empowered to speak up about their own ideas to make this thing the best it could possibly be,” says Regisford. New member Maxine Steen, who has made music with Dabice for years including their side project Rosie Thorne, was especially essential to the writing sessions.
WATCH PREVIOUSLY RELEASED VIDEOS FOR
The album opener “I Got Heaven” initially started as one of Steen’s demos. “When she showed it to me I knew it was going to be fun because the verses have this hard-hitting and aggressive approach but the chorus allows for a really soaring melody,” says Dabice. The result is electric. Over walloping guitar riffs, Dabice defiantly yells, “And what if I’m an angel? Oh what if I’m a bore? And what if I was confident would you just hate me more?
The song with its righteous lyrical blending of the sacred and profane is an unapologetic look at Christian hypocrisy. “I don’t think there’s ever been anything in need of a spiritual revolution more than modern-day Christianity,” says Dabice. “It sickens me the way that people use it as a way to do the worst things imaginable, say the worst things imaginable, and pass the worst imaginable legislation that directly harms people.” Instead of judgment, greed, and avarice, the songs on I Got Heaven ask what it really means to genuinely care about the people around you and help your communities in ways you can. “The world that we live in is heaven,” says Dabice. “We live on the most beautiful planet in the solar system, just by a chance and we are continuingly destroying it.”
This sentiment is mirrored by the album’s cover art: a figure and a pig in nature. There’s an intentional ambiguity there that makes you wonder if this person is leading the animal to slaughter or its protector. “We should really be the shepherds and the protectors of everything that we have and the world we live in,” says Dabice. I Got Heaven is an album that understands the stakes of its message: there are countless references to fire, hunger, and holiness. Here, teeth gnash and bodies are temples that ache with desire.
Even when the songs on I Got Heaven don’t deal with fundamental human questions about how to live, Mannequin Pussy still finds ways to add urgency and resonance. Just take the buoyant and playful single “I Don’t Know You,” which slowly builds to a hair-raising peak with Reading’s brushed percussion, Steen’s enveloping synths, and a thoughtful groove from Regisford. “On that song, I changed the tuning last minute which transformed the song but everyone instinctively knew what to do,” says Dabice. “It was really cool to watch a song come alive in real-time. It’s such a gift to meet other people who are creatively on the same wavelength as you, where there’s no judgment in sharing ideas.”
I Got Heaven is a visceral and stunning album for people who aren’t content with the status quo, made by people who challenged themselves and got out of their comfort zone. ”We’re supposed to be living in the freest era ever so what it means to be a young person in this society is the freedom to challenge these systems that have been put on to us,” says Dabice. “It makes sense to ask, what ultimately am I living for? What is it that makes me want to live?”
- I Got Heaven
- Loud Bark
- Nothing Like
- I Don’t Know You
- Sometimes
- OK? OK! OK? OK!
- Tell Me Softly
- Of Her
- Aching
- Split Me Open
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