Mannequin Pussy Isn’t Shying Away From the Rage
Our profile of The Ringer’s 2024 band of the year, the Philly hardcore kids who leveled up with their new album, ‘I Got Heaven’Mannequin Pussy Isn’t Shying Away From the Rage
Our profile of The Ringer’s 2024 band of the year, the Philly hardcore kids who leveled up with their new album, ‘I Got Heaven’
The festival was called Best Friends Forever, but Marisa Dabice was not there to make friends. If the Mannequin Pussy frontwoman had to choose between the two emo nostalgia weekends in Las Vegas this past October, better it’s the one where the Philly-based band was scheduled between Unwound and Sunny Day Real Estate. Still, during Mannequin Pussy’s 45-minute set, they took to the stage to NLE Choppa’s “Slut Me Out 2,” called out the price-gouging of bottled water, and hung a Palestinian flag from their synthesizer. One recap described Dabice as “rightfully aware of their own bad-bitchiness,” a glaring contrast to the topline acts, mostly genial 40- and 50-something dudes revisiting their romantic and religious crises of two or three decades prior. Taking stock of the whole affair, Dabice flatly states, “We were the most exciting, modern group of rock stars that anyone got to see.”
Lest this come off like a Rock Star talking their shit, Dabice is just saying what everyone else has about Mannequin Pussy in 2024. There haven’t been a lot of albums—modern rock or otherwise—that have managed much staying power outside of their release week, but I Got Heaven is one of them. A thrilling array of knife’s-edge alt-ragers, dusky introspection, and hardcore aggression, I Got Heaven is not just part of the 2024 Year-End List Starter Kit, but the young decade’s canon; Dabice is bemused at Pitchfork naming I Got Heaven the 87th best album of the 2020s, a little because it did so only six months after its release date, mostly because, “it could have been ranked higher than that.” (For posterity’s sake: It ranks second on The Ringer’s year-end albums list, out today.)
When the title track dropped in August 2023, I was struck by its self-assurance, that it just knew it was a hit: “What if I was confident, would you just hate me more?” Dabice shouted, the former part a rhetorical statement. The thunderous acclaim that met I Got Heaven when it finally arrived nine months later felt like a foregone conclusion, a just reward for a band that had consistently leveled up over the past decade despite, y’know, a name that needs asterisks in promo emails, lest it go straight to spam.
Released in 2013, Mannequin Pussy’s noisy debut created a buzz within their original homebase of New York City, but upon its reissue a year later, it had the unfortunate circumstance of competing with a buzzier, noisier New York City outfit named Perfect Pussy. Nonetheless, it led them to signing with Tiny Engines, the label that had cornered the market on interesting punk and emo-adjacent indie music in the mid-2010s. Romantic arrived in 2016, generating louder acclaim, opening slots for Joyce Manor and Japanese Breakfast and a leap to legendary punk institution Epitaph Records. Three years later, Mannequin Pussy fully came into their own with “Drunk II,” a searing, soaring anthem of self-destruction where nearly every lyric stops you dead in your tracks the first time you hear it.
Patience proved to be a prophetic title for their third album; Mannequin Pussy endured lineup changes, devastating breakups, and everything else that came with being alive in the United States since 2019. I Got Heaven is the clouds breaking on that stormy half-decade, a half hour of unrestrained desire—for spiritual deliverance, sexual satisfaction, for a complete reimagination of Christian faith, our relationship with Mother Earth and each other. On the opening title track, Dabice unforgettably asks, “What if Jesus himself ate my fucking snatch?” and as for the closing “Split Me Open,” just Google the lyrics for yourself.
Even as part of an indie rock realignment that increasingly put the grrrls to the front, Mannequin Pussy was seen as the realest of real deals, a true heir to the ’90s icons who crashed MTV and alt-rock radio but were still not given their proper due. In the 2021 HBO series Mare of Eastown, Siobhan Sheehan is a rebellious, strong-headed queer woman of high-school age who hangs out at the local college radio station and starts a band. Rather than create original music, the showrunners had Siobhan’s band play Mannequin Pussy songs as their own. Dabice has indeed noticed that most of Mannequin Pussy’s crowds of late are people seeing them for the first time, and, “the vast majority are young Gen Z girls and femmes and young gay people and queer people.” This is an encouraging trend for the millennials in Mannequin Pussy, who see their peers vacillating between indifference and acceptance of their anger about the state of the world. As for the newer Mannequin Pussy convert, “they're not a generation that is shying away from that rage.”
When I reach Dabice over Zoom, she’s sitting at an Alabama coffee shop while the rest of the band—drummer Kaleen Reading, bassist/vocalist Colins “Bear” Regisford, and multi-instrumentalist Maxine Steen—are watching the hometown Eagles dutifully smother the Giants in a 28-3 win; Dabice doesn’t identify with Philly sports as strongly as many of her peers, and sees Mannequin Pussy as more resemblant of Dennis Rodman than, say, Charles Barkley. The crowds are just as enthusiastic in New York and Philly as they are in San Diego, a city in which they’d never headlined. Yet Dabice is able to fully commit to the ravenous hunger of “Loud Bark” and “Split Me Open” every night because she spent the last year learning how to say no.
Best Friends Forever was one of Mannequin Pussy’s final shows of 2024, the end of a dizzying international whirlwind: To that point, they took the stage for Primavera in both Porto and Barcelona, along with Maifeld Derby, Best Kept Secret, Outbreak, Day In Day Out, Grrl Camp, Pitchfork, Osheaga, Sziget, Green Man, All Things Go, and Austin City Limits. That’s all in a span of five months, and doesn’t include their headlining dates in North America and Europe.
Consider the physical toll the average American endures when traveling internationally, of needing a mini-vacation to recover from the vacation itself. Mannequin Pussy would have done that twice in less than half a year, had they not called off the second European leg of the I Got Heaven tour with one month’s notice. The band announced they were taking a break for their mental and physical well-being, and maybe five or so years ago, this sort of thing was viewed as a euphemism in the music industry—perhaps you have memories of certain pop stars exhibiting erratic, likely substance-fueled behavior on stage and then having the tour canceled due to “exhaustion.”
But for Mannequin Pussy, there was no other way to put it but literally. Dabice was completely spent physically, spiritually, and emotionally, avoiding her typical “jovial walk around the venue” before each show. “I didn't want to be fucking seen by anyone I didn't want anyone to talk to me,” she explains, recognizing the path towards the same dull, old rock-star cliches of isolating and self-medicating through life on the road. “What do you do? You start drinking a lot so that you can feel any sort of comfortability to just get on stage and be around people.”
Some rock bands are able to sustain this sort of lifestyle and most are expected to. “And everyone says to me, ‘Missy you’re so strong’ / but what if I don’t want to be?” she sang on “Drunk II,” one of Mannequin Pussy’s most popular songs and one that Dabice eventually couldn’t bear to perform. “There was a whole year where I was like, ‘I don't want to play this fucking song anymore,’” she admits, and even as it was recently taken out of storage, she found herself forgetting the lyrics to “Drunk II” despite having done it a thousand times—“it’s like my body was physically rejecting it.” While plenty of bands retire their big hit as a contrarian impulse, Dabice was devastated not being able to share it with fans who were “bursting into tears and sending their heart out to me.” When I ask if she’s gotten any blowback from not playing “Drunk II,” she quips, “Luckily, we have more than one good song.”
What do you do? You start drinking a lot so that you can feel any sort of comfortability to just get on stage and be around people.Marisa Dabice
“Drunk II” began to feel like a symptom of a larger issue for Mannequin Pussy, as Dabice came to terms with having “the most unnatural job in the world,” one that requires embodying your most vulnerable self for applause in front of hundreds of people every night, where the size of the crowd (and thus the payday) is based on the authenticity of that performance. Even most professional athletes are granted a guaranteed salary, some degree of load management, and constant medical oversight. Besides, even if Nikola Jokic or Joel Embiid aren’t at 100 percent, they don’t have to emotionally commit to free throws the way Dabice does to “half pitcher down, I drink to drown.”
As with so many long-unexamined social mores in 2020, the typical album and touring cycle was on the verge of being completely dismantled and reimagined during that year’s profound upheaval; and like most things that were interrupted by COVID and mass social movements, things just sorta went back to normal a few years later. Bands, venues, and fans were all eager to make up for lost time, and for a short period, live music thrived and the festival bubble puffed up once again.
But with inflation impacting every aspect of tour planning, bottlenecks in venue availability and fatigue amongst bands and audiences alike, it wasn’t long before tour cancellations became a regular part of daily music news. For every self-deprecating admission of slow ticket sales, there are many more situations like those facing legacy acts like Animal Collective to ascendant buzz bands like Feeble Little Horse, where touring just didn’t make sense financially. Or, the Armed, a band that has literally made physical perfection their defining characteristic. If these guys can’t tough it out, who can?
Presumably, a band like Mannequin Pussy. After all, isn’t the whole point of splitting a $200 guarantee five ways and sleeping on floors and living on green room Sabra hummus for an entire decade getting to indie rock’s top tier, where you can white-knuckle through a year of (supposedly) lucrative festival dates and go back into hibernation? “That an album cycle is supposed to be this 18- to 24-month thing if your album's really hot is psychotic to me,” Dabice stresses. “What fucking good is money if we're all losing our fucking minds?”
For all of their trepidation about letting people down, Mannequin Pussy’s announcement was well received. The fans got it, fellow artists got it, and even the people with a vested financial interest in Mannequin Pussy’s sustained success have been understanding. Dabice feels they’re lucky in that regard, though. “We were hearing from worried friends and peers in other bands, and they're like, ‘I wish our management listened to us when we tried to cancel a tour.’” In particular, she mentions a friend in a “really popular indie rock band” that was strong-armed into finishing their tour by their team and became so burnt out that they haven’t played a show in three years. “People who are on the industry side, if you're not on stage, you need to shut the fuck up about what you think is best for artists because artists are the ones who actually have to get on stage every night,” she states. “They're the ones that you should be taking your points of reference from.”
What fucking good is money if we’re all losing our fucking minds?Dabice
After canceling their European dates, Dabice and the band took nearly two months to repair themselves; she linked up with a “gym bro” personal trainer for Pilates and energy healing, as well as a therapist with music industry experience, “so I wouldn’t have to spend four sessions explaining what touring is like.” The latter has indeed become something of a growth industry in recent years, as Grizzly Bear’s Ed Droste and United Nations guitarist/journalist Jonah Bayer put music aside to get credentialed as therapists. “After the first week off, I was like, ‘yeah, I don’t feel any different,’” she recalls, estimating that it took about five weeks before she felt “normal again.” And though Dabice emerged from the break newly energized and motivated, “it just made me so angry at the fact that what I was experiencing is not something that is accessible to the large majority of Americans and my friends and family as well.”
Having enough time to hop off the proverbial treadmill onto a literal one is not a privilege that Dabice had for most of her life; not when she was putting in 50-hour workweeks for minimum wage just to survive, and not even in 2019, when Mannequin Pussy was rising off the strength of Patience. Back then, Dabice was too accustomed to treating herself like shit—perhaps partly because of the pressures the industry puts on artists—but more importantly, she was too caught up in what others might think about her. “I’m lucky that my band didn’t pop off until my mid-30s,” she says, achieving her greatest level of success after years of becoming “more emotionally bulletproof” towards internet chatter.
For the most part, Mannequin Pussy have bypassed the backlash that typically follows an album as uniformly celebrated as I Got Heaven. The worst they’ve gotten thus far is merely qualified praise: “some of the lovelorn charisma has been lost,” “mass appeal might be the only thing missing,” and even that’s referring to the band name more than the music itself. The closest Mannequin Pussy has gotten to actual controversy came with their video for “Nothing Like.” Though the clip required “hours and hours” of live footage, storyboarding and animation, the use of AI to underscore the song’s bionic electro-rock pulse caused a predictable mini-outrage. Dabice diplomatically opened up a line of communication “if we know each other in real life,” and the heat died down in a matter of hours. “Artists are constantly trying to use technology and creativity together to come up with something new,” she explains. In a way, it’s not dissimilar to old conversations about Auto-Tune, drum machines, synthesizers, or any other piece of hardware that was once viewed as the end of humanity in music.
We last spoke in late October, so I’m unsure whether the optimistic note on which Dabice ended our conversation still holds; the band hasn’t posted on X since May. Mannequin Pussy have New Zealand and Japan on their itinerary for the rest of 2024, and this time she feels fully energized and prepared for the journey, having discovered a way to be “domestic beings” on the road. “We can’t be treating our bodies like it’s 2019,” Dabice jokes; the band mostly bonds on the tour bus by making soup and cracking each other’s backs. “I just want to sit down and I want to have a garden and make a meal,” she admits. “My body and my soul are ready to get creative again.”