Is there anything to rebel against in your thirties? That’s a question any millennial lover-of-punk-rock or any formerly angsty teenager will occasionally find themselves asking, and it’s the question I found myself asking as Joyce Manor released their latest album.
Joyce Manor is a three-piece punk band from California. If you’re a punk rock devotee, these guys are the quintessential example of a band doing it the right way. Their ascension has been gradual and hard-earned across nearly two decades of work. Grinding tours. A growing discography. Minor but meaningful sonic evolution.
They’re also firmly into their mid-thirties at this point; one bandmate is flirting with forty.
There’s an alternative version of the same question: why do writers and performers of punk rock seemingly inevitably forfeit their edge as they age out of their twenties? The music loses its bite, or the artists sell out to some other genre, or the band breaks up to work stable jobs and settle down, or the frontman (typically) gets kicked out for impropriety or addiction, the examples feel almost cliche.
With these questions in mind, the release of I Used To Go To This Bar became strangely important to me. As a mid-thirties pastor with graying temples, there was something I needed from this album, which surprised me. Because, to be clear, God has been kind to me. I have a gift of a wife, two healthy kids with another on the way, a home, a career I enjoy. I’m not trying to brag, I promise. This is simply the phase of life I’m in, and I repeatedly (to the point of annoyingly) thank God for it.
But, deep in my bones is a love of something that punk rock uniquely captures. I’ve written in another recent essay about the essential nature of defiance in punk rock, so I won’t belabor it here. In short, defiance is integral to the musical and thematic structure of punk music, and for a collection of reasons it doesn’t tend to age well. Which makes sense. Defiance in a teenager, painful as it is, is far less disconcerting than when it manifests in a middle-aged adult. And there’s a lot of the latter going around these days.
Even as I benefit from a relatively stable season of life in which I get to enjoy some of the fruit of God’s grace through ordinary life, I maintain that defiance and rebellion serve an important contextual purpose. There are particular aspects of the human experience that are worth fighting against, and punk rock at its best aims at those, or at least helps capture the feeling of defiance that can and ought to motivate us against darkness and deception.
Thankfully, Joyce Manor’s album does have something to say regarding the two questions above. While the challengers a thirty-something defies are a little different and perhaps a little more nuanced, they’re worth acknowledging and combating.
To start, this album is comfortably at home in the punk tradition of rejecting broader musical trends to release maximally for the sake of Spotify plays, whether that’s long albums or popular album release rhythms (i.e. approximately yearly music drops). I Used To Go To This Bar is the band’s first album in four years and has only nine songs and rings in at nineteen minutes. It’s funny when you think about it, or at least ironic — it strikes of a band making it by being pointedly uninterested in making it. They’re chopping at the roots of the tree of music stardom. Punk music has something to say and will often be spartan in its artistic rendering of that statement. Incidentally, I can listen to the whole thing during one or two trips in the car.
One advantage of the brevity of the release is that I’ve listened to it closely again and again, certainly eclipsing two dozen times. While poetic, the album has the focus of a spelling bee champion. It’s about two things.
First, it’s interested in realistic nostalgia. By the time you’re in your thirties, even the most comfortable of lives has grown weary. There are a multitude of personal, past pains you’re carrying. There have been losses and wounds, and there’s a diminishing return on what your youthful dreams look like in reality. In their own words: “Had the worst day ever so far, got run over by my dream car…” Likewise, you’ve learned to imbibe joy in its luminous spots along the way, like a rare-for-Joyce-Manor topic, love, which makes an inconspicuous appearance in “Falling Into It.” It’s a chiseled, world-wise outlook. Life is full of good and bad, and often the bad outweighs the good. But the way to more good is through the bad, so take one or two more steps.
Second, it’s about seeing oneself and one’s sinfulness clearly. I don’t think the band would accept the theological category, to be fair. Nonetheless, it is a fact that, while we are the protagonist of our own stories, we’re not the hero. We cannot shake our own perspective and its limits; we fail people often and drag our burdens into each room with us, so let’s be honest about the strengths and weaknesses therein.
The album opener, “I Know Where Mark Chen Lives,” is a prototypical pop punk anthem down to the song title; it sounds like it’d be at home in a 2000s Fall Out Boy album. Simple, driving drums usher us to the angst of daily living. As if to answer the question, what’s this album for? “When you can’t afford anything anymore, tell me how are you gonna swim to shore? When you can’t explain the damage done to your brain, but it’s clear that it’s severe and it’s here to stay.” The central metaphor of the hook is a train that’s coming, and it’s scary. That’s a lot of life, which is the point.
With the lead single of the album, “All My Friends Are So Depressed,” I’m convinced we’ve hit an important peak in emo music of the last decade or so. There has been a crescendo of western music and rockabilly as sub-genres in punk music. This song will be the mountaintop we remember for its scenic view and the feeling it evoked as emo music gravitates to other, different sub-genres again. In its tendency toward rebellious experimentation the genre will move on, so if you’ve ever wondered what happens when a punk rock band writes music for a western, this is your chance. It’s glorious.
I’ll be listening to and thinking about this song for a long time because of its deliberate twist. The music is moving but unembellished, again, like a lot of daily life. And while the primary lyrical punch (also the title of the song) gestures in one direction, the rest of the lyrics nod in another. It’s true that I know many, many people wrestling with varying degrees of anxiety and depression, both the diagnosable kinds and the everyday kinds. I’d guess the gentle majority of the millennials I know are medicated to these ends. But, the song is actually about the singer’s own depression, about failing others and the weight of daily living. Others’ sadness and depression are merely another thing about which the lyricist is depressed; the psychological struggle of others becomes a metaphor for the disappointment of life in general.
For what it’s worth, this song is the most commercially successful one the band has ever written, which is apt. The musical trends, the simplicity, the potency of the lyrics all align to create a substantive work of art.
The title track, “I Used to Go to This Bar,” expertly balances the tone and message of the album. No wonder its name overhangs the whole thing. The music is shiny and moves energetically, almost too energetically; it’d be easy to miss the feeling of longing in the voice. A sadness in the protracted words. That feeling blooms in the chorus, “Time goes by so slowly, baby, I wish you were here.”
What does it feel like to lose people you love? Kind of like this song. Life keeps moving, oftentimes too quickly. But the ache persists, and at the same time, there’s a subtle joy to looking back on earlier, simpler seasons of life. Unspectacular places that were yours; the details of people and situations that seemed inconsequential at the time. Those are the hooks and hanging paintings that populate your memories, and they create a little bit of optimism about the future - maybe I’ll love this place and these people that way too.
Drawing the album to a close, “Grey Guitar” is a little more guarded, but it’s a musical flex. This might be Joyce Manor at the height of their emo powers. Soaring guitars meld with brooding lyrics into something that lingers in listeners. Feelings of confusion and dread are masked with distraction, like playing a grey guitar, but this intellectual and emotional interplay leads to a certain kind of personal clarity: “We both know that they can’t fix you, they haven’t got the parts.” And, “One day they’ll come to get you, and expose what’s in your heart.” However we deal with our anxieties, the friction of life can guide us to something like a direction. The desires of our hearts and the path forward can and do materialize in the real world, for better and for worse.
This album has been a gift to me. What can we rightfully rebel against as we age, according to this album? Two things: false dichotomies and self-aggrandizement.
Sharp pains litter the timeline of life, but enduring in love makes it all worth it… somehow. We need not drop into the gutter of nihilism, and we ought not pretend the beauty of the rose is unadorned with bloody thorns. In turn, we are all small but meaningful characters in this grand narrative. We share and amplify each others’ joys and sorrows, and we’re here today and gone tomorrow. No need to be anything less than honest about our smallness and propensity to fall short.
Though it feels a little derivative, I’ll say it anyway: there’s immense value individually and culturally to rebelling against both these false dichotomies and an exalted sense of our own importance. Many of the ills of our time arise from these character flaws exactly. We’re prone to a lack of nuance, to oversimplification. We’re often unwilling to understand the coherence or emotional vitality of an opposing argument, and to alleviate the tension we’ll elevate ourselves and our feelings and our tribe. There’s us, and there’s them. It’s a surefire path to disunity, and the ashes it leaves behind are the combustion of grace. If you’re beyond your youth, you should defy these norms. Your thirties should carry the force of some battle-tested wisdom to the cause of grace and peace.
I’ve got two critical thoughts on the album, neither of which is fair, but I stand by them. First, I’ve talked to one or two connoisseurs of punk rock who miss earlier iterations of Joyce Manor. That’s fair. Musically, this album is tighter and quieter. It’s what I think defiance looks like as it gets older. Some of the rawness is gone, smoothed over by the friction of life they sing about; the band appears to have more clarity thematically and musically. I’d say that’s true about my life as well, which is why I’m thankful for the evolution, but I get it.
Second, as with most artistic renderings unmoored from the gospel, the album makes a helpful case for enduring life’s tribulations, but it doesn’t have any principled argument for sustaining real hope. There can be no kingdom without the King, and I’m glad to say the band doesn’t pretend otherwise.
Endurance for its own sake feels like a death sentence of sorts to me, one that takes longer and goes down limping, but I’m glad for the call nonetheless. Resilient people are capable of stronger bonds and, more importantly, have more time for the good news of Jesus to grant true hope. Our realism and willingness to persist become more powerful in the light of both Jesus’s death and resurrection. The impact may look small in an ordinary day, but they load our endurance with life-changing purpose. The gospel grants courage and community through the pains of life and sings of the reign of love and justice, which maps evermore onto reality as the kingdom comes.