{"id":398657,"date":"2026-01-30T11:36:16","date_gmt":"2026-01-30T11:36:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/398657\/"},"modified":"2026-01-30T11:36:16","modified_gmt":"2026-01-30T11:36:16","slug":"joyce-manor-i-used-to-go-to-this-bar-album-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/398657\/","title":{"rendered":"Joyce Manor: I Used to Go to This Bar Album Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

Almost a decade and a half after they took basements and Tumblrs across America by storm with a raucous, self-flagellating singalong<\/a> about avoiding your crush at a party, Joyce Manor<\/a> have continued to mine everyday indignities for pop-punk gold. They\u2019ve evaded the corniness and juvenility that have soured later-career records from some of their biggest<\/a> inspirations<\/a>. Instead, the Los Angeles band\u2019s seventh album falls more in line with DIY lifers like PUP<\/a>, Jeff Rosenstock<\/a>, the Menzingers<\/a>, and Los Campesinos!<\/a>\u2014all of whom have spent their last few records using gruff, rowdy pop-punk as a conduit to interrogate the genre\u2019s inherent immaturity. They\u2019re exploring the tension between outgrowing the scene and feeling like too much of a fuckup for anywhere else.<\/p>\n

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\u2019re probably too old to do\u2014sleeping well into the afternoon, getting too drunk or too stoned (at times it feels like the album could be called Hungover Again<\/a>). Since their 2011 debut, Joyce Manor have strayed little from the formula that\u2019s made them one of the most consistent contemporary punk bands, filtering depths-of-despair angst through sticky guitar melodies and fist-pumping rhythms. There\u2019s a reason you couldn\u2019t go to a house show between 2014 and 2019 without hearing a \u201cConstant Headache\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

No score yet, be the first to add.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cWell, Whatever It Was\u201d mentions getting hit by a car as just one mishap in \u201cthe worst day ever so far\u201d 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: \u201cAs the darkness was surrounding\/And my heart began a-pounding\/You could feel the tension mounting\/And it never did break.\u201d \u201cAll My Friends Are So Depressed,\u201d while chugging along with its swaggering bassline and Rivers Cuomo<\/a>-meets-Morrissey<\/a> self-deprecation, isn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

The depressive shadow that looms over I Used to Go to This Bar is more interesting when it manifests in less obvious ways\u2014an angry outburst in a weed dispensary just before the vein-popping chorus of \u201cI Know Where Mark Chen Lives,\u201d or a fever dream about getting high with an opossum who\u2019s got a \u201cprison past\u201d\u2014or 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 (\u201cTime goes by so slowly baby\/I wish you were here,\u201d goes the sunny chorus). The fact that the narrator\u2019s object of affection has died doesn\u2019t come up until halfway through, alongside a detail about missing the funeral.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Almost a decade and a half after they took basements and Tumblrs across America by storm with a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":398658,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[375,96,128,56,54,55,307],"class_list":{"0":"post-398657","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-albums","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-music","11":"tag-uk","12":"tag-united-kingdom","13":"tag-unitedkingdom","14":"tag-web"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/398657","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=398657"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/398657\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/398658"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=398657"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=398657"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=398657"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}