Joyce Manor: “A break did us a lot of good”

“You always worry when you take a break whether people will just move on and forget about you, you know?” says Joyce Manor’s endlessly engaging frontman Barry Johnson. “You worry that when you come back, you’re gonna be significantly smaller – because that can happen. For us, I think a break did us a lot of good.”

The break in question came between Joyce Manor’s excellent 2018 ‘Million Dollars to Kill Me,’ and its equally brilliant 2022 follow-up ’40oz To Fresno’, but it’s now, with the benefit of time and space, that the band can really appreciate the importance of such a pause.

It’s been all systems go since then, too. ’40oz to Fresno’ was quickly followed by a celebratory anniversary tour for the Californian punks’ beloved third album, ‘Never Hungover Again’. Now, barely three years later, they’re back with another winning effort, ‘I Used To Go To This Bar’. In short, since the turn of the decade, Joyce Manor have Levelled The Fuck Up.

Having initially been championed as part of the emo revival – even though the shoe never really fit – Joyce Manor (completed by Chase Knobbe, Matt Ebert, and a rotating cast of drummers) are now arguably the most important pop-punk band of a generation.

“Starting in 2011, we put out the first record, and we did the first touring we’d ever really done. It’s like the very beginning of becoming ‘blank’ from ‘blank’ – like ‘Oh, that’s Barry from Joyce Manor’,” says Barry. “That fucks with your head. I was 24 when that happened. When I was 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, I was just Barry – like ‘Oh, he’s a waiter at this restaurant’, or ‘I know him from this bar’. But then people who don’t know you know who you are… like, it’s what I signed up for. I mean, I get excited – like ‘Oh shit, there’s Brian Bell from Weezer’. I get it. And I’m not saying it’s necessarily a bad thing. But we did five records in a row – you put it out, tour on it, go back, write a new record. I just got to the end of it. And it coincided with a breakup…”

“But during this period, people began talking to me about the band differently. Our band got a lot more popular; Pitchfork did a Sunday Review of the first record. It’s like we got some sort of cred that we didn’t necessarily have before.

“And then you see bands like [future tourmates] Combat coming up. You can tell they came up on Jeff Rosenstock and Joyce Manor, but they’re doing their own thing with it. It’s like this is our OG era; we’re more popular than we’ve ever been, and the break definitely helped with that.”

“Our band got a lot more popular”

Along the way, this heightened profile has seen the group pick up some celebrity fans. This interview is taking place almost exactly a year to the day that the ‘Never Hungover Again’ anniversary tour rolled into Los Angeles’ iconic Hollywood Palladium, when Joyce Manor were joined on stage by punk-rock royalty Mark Hoppus for a wildly enjoyable take on the anthemic ‘Heart Tattoo’. If you want to see just how much this meant to Joyce Manor, a positively beaming Barry can be seen on videos of the recording. “You really can’t imagine [how much of a big deal it was],” he laughs.

One of their biggest champions, however, remains Epitaph head honcho and Bad Religion icon Brett Gurewitz. Not content with just being the man at the label, this time around, he got his hands dirty, so to speak, and helmed production duties on the record.

“He really wants the record to be successful – I mean, he wants all of our records to be a success – but this time he’s got a very personal stake in it,” jokes Barry. “It is a very unusual arrangement; it’s kind of a conflict of interest in some ways.

“Usually, you have a producer pushing back against the record label. I was just listening to an interview with Weezer from ’95, and they were talking about how Ric Ocasek was a great liaison between the label and the band. He had enough cachet and commanded that he wasn’t afraid of the label. He was like, ‘Shut the fuck up, leave us alone, we’re making ‘The Blue Album’.’ Obviously, Brett can’t do that.

“It’s funny, though, because he confided in me that he was upset that we didn’t ask him to produce ’40oz to Fresno’. I was like, ‘If I went to the dentist, would you be bummed if I didn’t ask you to be my dentist?’ I was like, ‘Don’t you have kids and shit. You can’t just drop everything to produce our records.’ He had texted before saying we should let him produce a song, but it never really lined up, and I always just assumed that he didn’t have the time. But he did really want to produce us, and it was an amazing fit. He knew how he wanted us to sound. It was really, really awesome.”

For such a long and storied career in music, it’s surprising to learn that Gurewitz hasn’t produced a huge amount of records, though, and outside of several Rancid staples and some Bad Religion efforts, Joyce Manor represents probably the biggest act he’s helmed.  

The love goes both ways, too, with Gurewitz comparing Barry to a modern-day Ernest Hemingway in the record’s press kit.

Indeed, it feels like a rather apt comparison. Barry’s unquestionably one of the finest songwriters of his generation, and his ability to spin yarns within a two-minute runtime is peerless. ‘I Used To Go To This Bar’ is no exception, and again consists of some of the tightest songwriting you could possibly imagine.

The beauty of it, though, is that it feels almost effortless; there’s such a natural feeling to Barry’s lyrics that you’d be hard-pressed to see the workings out and the editing that takes place behind the scenes to get these songs parade-ready.

“I worked really, really hard on the individual songs,” attests Barry. “A lot of these songs have a lot of versions to them. I’d be working on a song for a few days, and then my bandmates would send over an idea, and say, ‘What about this?’ I’d be like ‘Oh, dude, I’ve changed it like three times already. That song doesn’t even resemble what you have.’

“I think just the sheer number of hours I put into the songs… like, I’ve got a lot better at making demos at home, and put a lot of effort into that. I think that affords me a lot of time to overwork stuff, but I think I got stuff where it needed to be by the end.”

Yet Joyce Manor are also something of an enigma. For example, Johnson himself remains appreciative of the status afforded to ‘Never Hungover Again’, resulting in an anniversary tour; he’s not one to want to spend too long in the nostalgia space – “I think it’s, it’s okay in small doses, but I don’t think it’s good for the culture,” he’ll attest.

But for the second album running, the band have found themselves revisiting past glories, updating an old song and bringing it up to date to match Joyce Manor’s current styling.

On ’40oz to Fresno’, the band reworked the song ‘Never Be The Same Again’ into ‘NBTSA’. Now a fan favourite, it was originally released on the Polyvinyl 4-track series of singles and remains a collector’s item for hardcore fans. This time around, they’ve reworked an early demo song, ‘Fuck Koalacaust’, into (the somewhat appropriately titled) ‘Well, Don’t It Seem Like You’ve Been Here Before’, breathing new life into a track they rediscovered while looking to add some older tracks into tour setlists.

“The song’s really fun. I wanted to put out a good-sounding recording of it,” says Barry. “When we were practising it, we loved playing it, and when we went into record a batch of songs for the record, we were like ‘Let’s get a hi-fi recording of that.’ And it was cool how it came out, and it fit with the record.”

Indeed, it’s the perfect fit on an album that slots perfectly into the group’s canon. Few bands have been as consistently excellent as Joyce Manor over the past 15 years, and every album has ultimately found a home with their switched-on and attentive fanbase. ‘I Used To Go To This Bar’ is another winner from Barry (from Joyce Manor) and the boys…

Joyce Manor’s album ‘I Used To Go To This Bar’ is out 30th January.