Philadelphia indie punk band Mannequin Pussy have announced their new album Patience, due June 21st on Epitaph.
The third full-length from Mannequin Pussy, Patience is an album fascinated with the physical experience of the body, its songs tracking the movements of mouths and hands and racing hearts, skin and spit and teeth and blood. Deeply attuned to the power of their own physicality, members Colins Rey Regisford (bass, samples, vocals), Kaleen Reading (drums, percussion), Marisa Dabice (guitar, vocals), and Athanasios Paul (guitar, keys) channel complex emotion in blistering riffs, thrashing rhythms, vocals that feel as immediate and untamed as a gut reaction. But throughout Patience, the band contrasts that raw vitality with intricate melodies and finely detailed arrangements, building a strange and potent tension that makes the album all the more cathartic. Patience matches Mannequin Pussy’s wild volatility with a narrative voice that’s often painfully vulnerable.
On the first new shared track, ‘Drunk II’ Dabice explains,
“It’s too easy now to look back on that song and feel a mixture of pity and disgust for myself and the emotions I poured into it. I never saw a breakup as anything other than emotional torture. But now, I understand that a breakup is a gift. Heartbreak is a gift. Someone leaving your life when you don’t expect them to is one of the most honest things we can experience. By electing to leave your life someone is telling you their truth: that they can’t be there for you the way you wish they could. That they can’t love you the way that you loved them. It took me a long time to realize that it is better to be alone than to be with someone who doesn’t really want to be there. You should never have to convince someone to love you. At the end of the song when I sing ‘Everyone gather round, I have the answer now’ – that is what I’m saying.”
Dabice, who directed the video says, “I wanted to capture the feeling that so many of us experience when we are heartbroken and trying to move on. We pretend we have fun so that we are socially acceptable to those around us. We hope that drinking will make us happy and we wish that our nights will lead us into the arms of a beautiful stranger who will momentarily distract us from the pain we feel. I wanted to blend reality and fantasy in the music video for “Drunk II” – where you aren’t quite sure if my character is just out with her bandmates and friends, pitifully crying to them about their lost love or if they are actually meeting those beautiful strangers every night. I wanted to show what it feels like to be out and heartbroken – that no matter where you are it feels like you are the only one with a broken heart. That everyone around you is deeply in love and you are completely alone. That no matter who you meet, you can’t stop thinking about that person who you lost.”
Patience came to life at Studio 4 in Conshohocken, Pennsylvania. In creating the album, Mannequin Pussy worked with producer/engineer Will Yip (Quicksand, The Menzingers), shaping an explosive sound that never overshadows the subtlety of their songwriting.
“In the past there’s been a chaotic feeling to the recording process, but working with Will put us in a different headspace,” says Dabice. “It helped us show our progression over the past few years and make a very crisp-sounding record, without losing the dirtiness of what Mannequin Pussy really is.”
Patience is out June 21st via Epitaph
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