Barry Johnson didn’t want to write more punk songs. As the lead singer of California pop-punk band Joyce Manor, he’d spent nearly two decades doing just that. Plus, he’d already penned indie rock-leaning tracks for the band’s seventh album I Used to Go to This Bar. So when Bad Religion co-founder and the album’s producer, Brett Gurewitz, informed him that the LP needed faster songs, Johnson wasn’t thrilled.
“It fucking pissed me off,” Johnson tells Rolling Stone. “I was like, ‘What? No. To what end?,’” he recalls on Zoom. He wears a black t-shirt and talks with his tattooed hands as he shakes his head and shrugs, pantomiming his initial annoyance at Gurewitz’s suggestion.
“There was a last-minute studio thing where we were like, ‘Let’s just record ‘The Opossum’ [a song on the album] the fast way and see how it goes,’” bassist Matt Ebert chimes in from under the brim of his L.A. Dodgers baseball cap.
Of course, everyone loved the fast version better.
Johnson and co weren’t surprised that the punk rock legend was absolutely right about the song and the need for a more urgent pace across the album. Even a year after the recording process, Johnson, Ebert and guitarist Chase Knobbe continue to hold a special reverence for Gurewitz as their producer and overall mentor. “We owe a lot to Brett for saying something that’s difficult to say to a sensitive, little particular artist like myself,” admits Johnson. “His production style, temperament, and energy… it was just such a good fit for our personalities and our band,” he adds.
It helps that Gurewitz and Joyce Manor go way back. As the owner of Epitaph Records, Gurewitz signed the band in 2013 and released their third LP, Never Hungover Again, the following year. While the Torrence-bred rockers had formed years prior in 2008 and released two Tumblr-buzzworthy records before signing to Gurewitz’s label, the move yielded a major step-up. With headspinningly short, yet eloquently written songs, Never Hungover Again became Joyce Manor’s seminal record — and quickly cemented the pop-punk rockers as earnest voices of the genre’s fourth wave.
Over the past decade, Joyce Manor have continued to release consistently great pop-punk records, with brief indie rock stops on 2018’s Cody and 2022’s 40 Oz. to Fresno. “We’ve really been refining the same sound for a long time,” Johnson says. It’s a rare feat and one that has paid off in recent years. In 2021, Pitchfork heralded the band’s 2011 self-titled debut in a glowing Sunday Review. Following that nostalgic bump, Joyce Manor kicked off a relentless touring slate that found them opening for Weezer and sharing the stage with Mark Hoppus during a sold-out show at the Hollywood Palladium.
But Joyce Manor aren’t just becoming hometown heroes in their own right, they’re also leveling up on the national stage. In 2022, they showcased their “loud music” on John Mulaney’s Everybody’s in L.A. and this spring they’ll make their Coachella debut. “There’s something about being on that poster that’s kind of legitimizing,” Johnson says of the festival. Almost 20 years after their inception, Joyce Manor has entered a totally new phase.
It makes sense, then, that after all those milestones, the band made one of their best projects yet. I Used to Go to This Bar is a frenetic, in-your-face album that finds the band incorporating harmonicas and jangly guitars into their dependable pop-punk. Johnson describes the result as “L.A. rockabilly” or rather, “cowpunk.” But with Gurewitz shaping the sound, elements of Rancid and even Blink-182 pierce through. “It was a decision to make it feel just really lively and have a lot of clarity and punchiness to the record,” Knobbe says. He recalls a time when Gurewitz pushed him to redo a guitar part: the producer’s lightning-speed pace paired with a no-bullshit attitude made Knobbe whip into action. “His vision for what the sonics of the record should be, it demands a really energetic and confident performance,” he says.
In that way, I Used to Go to This Bar nods to the soundscapes of Joyce Manor’s earlier records. Lyrically, there’s also a sobering reflective quality the band first nailed on 2011 fan-favorite “Constant Headache.” With songs like “I Know Where Mark Chen Lives” and the title track, the new record finds the band turning that wistful tone into a darker one as they re-examine the drug abuse and alcoholism from their past. It’s a theme which formed unintentionally as Joyce Manor reflected on people they lost to both diseases in recent years.
For Knobbe, loss meant going “straight into reflection mode” and asking “What does that say about me and about how we all grew up?” Joyce Manor are less concerned with answering that question as they are with painting an honest portrait.
In those tracks, the memories are littered with harsh realities like getting held at gunpoint outside sketchy weed shops in California or wasting days away at the same old sad bar. “That made me nostalgic in a way that I could handle because it’s not the good old days,” Johnson says of writing those songs. “I always have to balance a little bit of nostalgia with remembering how it actually was.”
And really there’s no point in looking back in time when Joyce Manor’s future is as exciting as ever. “I don’t quite know what to make of it,” Ebert, 39, says of the band’s increased visibility. “But it’s really exciting,” he adds.
Johnson finds the new wave of attention particularly interesting considering how long they’ve been a band. “It’s not like we’re this new up and coming thing,” he says, adding, “We’ve somehow managed to be this sort of underground band for a long time.”
Meanwhile, at 34, Knobbe is grateful their steady rise occurred when they were old enough to handle it. “The slow drip of all of these things, it’s been pretty easy to digest over the years,” he says. “If it all happened at once or much earlier in our career without the kind of validation and confidence you get from sticking with it for so long, it would’ve been pretty overwhelming.”
Johnson fully agrees. “If that Weezer thing happened to me in the beginning of our band, I would’ve been three dabs in at gunpoint. That’s where I would’ve been on the psychic scale,” he says with a laugh, referring back to the story in “I Know Where Mark Chen Lives.”
But as Joyce Manor reflects on the dizzying events that led to their current moment, the band isn’t hungry for more than what they’ve already achieved. They’re not quite looking to sell out amphitheaters or gain a whole new swath of fans at Coachella. “We’ve just been kind of strutting down pop-punk street, taking in the scenery and enjoying it,” Johnson says, adding, “ I just want to keep doing that.”
Both Knobbe and Ebert have a similar outlook: they want to play the long game, but only if it’s the same one they’re in right now. It’s no wonder Joyce Manor has kept the same trio all these years. At their core, they’re just a band of California dudes riding the wave — and why shouldn’t they? After all, as Ebert sums it up, “doing our thing that we’ve always done is what got us here in the first place.”
