Hello! 😊👋
Welcome to a new edition of the Best Music of All Time newsletter!
Today’s music pick is a blistering and genuinely moving noise rock standout.
Genre: Noise Rock, Punk,
Label: Epitaph
Release Date: March 1, 2024
Vibe: 🤘🤘
Mannequin Pussy’s I Got Heaven is a blistering punk record that feels very of this moment. It effortlessly recalls the 90s alt-rock scene by conjuring up flashes of Sonic Youth, Hole, or even the Pixies, but in a way that updates that gritty urgency for a contemporary, much more online audience. It’s an emotional record that lets romantic longing and existential dread bubble up to the surface between moments of teeth-gnashing punk defiance. For all the power chords and razor-sharp guitar work on display throughout, there’s a longing on tracks like “I Don’t Know You” and especially the record’s closer, “Split Me Open.” Frontwoman Marisa Dabice’s perfectly calibrated vocal performance sticks the landing with lyrics that, in lesser hands, would’ve come across as schmaltz lobbying for cheap emotional payoffs. The simplicity of writing, such as, “I'm worried I want you/With the power/Of a thousand suns burning as one,” is one of several moments on this record that are genuinely moving.
Among the pop culture contextualization is how Mannequin Pussy can exist, much less thrive, in an age when online censorship can be both overbearing and underwhelming. As detailed in this eye-opening New Yorker piece, the band’s name briefly got shadowbanned from TikTok, among other platforms, severely limiting their music’s reach. However, replacing the second word in that moniker with a colloquialism for male genitalia was not only perfectly acceptable—it led scrollers to the group’s songs. The incident fuels the steadfast feminism on I Got Heaven, unflinching in its criticism of the world’s treatment of anything that disrupts the power dynamic associated with the male gaze. “To be feminine is to be profane,” Dabice says at one point, a concept that underpins the unfettered rage at the heart of an LP like Live Through This. I hope this effort, the band’s best so far in their career, will get as much respect as that classic.
👉 Don’t forget to click the album image to stream the album on your favorite platform 👈