Mannequin Pussy’s Divine Intervention

When people think about the Philadelphia music scene, one of the first places that comes to mind is Johnny Brenda’s. I love it here, but I’m not familiar with navigating it in the daytime—when the bar and grill is open to the public for midday lunches in sunny Fishtown. So, when I stroll into JB’s on a Thursday afternoon, I feel a tad awkward, unsure of where to sit or how long I can get away with nursing a glass of ice water before making a lunch entrée selection. On the other hand, when the members of Mannequin Pussy—Marisa Dabice, Maxine Steen, Bear Regisford and Kaleen Reading—walk in, they’re immediately greeted as longtime friends in the sparse restaurant. That’s because they are longtime friends of the storied venue, having packed its stages numerous times over and coming regularly and independently for the bar’s and other delicacies. This is my first time seeing the band in their home environment after seeing them rock two stages in Cleveland. We settle in at a booth towards the restaurant’s midsection and talk about their new album, I Got Heaven.

When Marisa and Thanasi Paul first started Mannequin Pussy in 2010, they cut their teeth in Philadelphia’s underground punk scene, generating a consistent buzz that kept their name at the top of everybody’s mind. “Our fans are people who are not immediately turned off by the word ‘pussy,’” Marisa elaborates. At one time, that fanbase might have been a narrow, young generation clad in black and prone to moshing, but in 2024, that demographic has grown tremendously. “For a while, before Gen Z started coming to an age where they could go to shows and explore their own interests, our fans were mostly our own age. Now we have a fanbase that often runs young and queer,” Marisa continues. “Now, dads are starting to bring their young daughters to shows and bonding.”

While Mannequin Pussy has an enthusiastic international audience, the band is particularly grateful for the support they’ve gathered at home in Eastern Pennsylvania: “Bear said something that stood out to me which is that, often, your hometown falls in love with you last. I think Philly very much loved us first,” Marisa adds. Bear attributes Philadelphia’s rapport with fans of cult stardom to the scene’s immediate embrace of their unusual brand of punk. Philly is a big city, one that has produced titans of jazz, soul, emo, shoegaze and more, so audiences are primed to welcome bands who dart between different sounds—so long as they’re done well.

In Philadelphia, there are simply so many musicians who want to perform with their friends, which leads to mixed-genre bills where the links between the sounds are few, but there’s a shared reverence that the musicians and the audiences share that makes it all make sense. I think about this when I remember seeing Mannequin Pussy open for Japanese Breakfast—a peer whose sound couldn’t be more different—at The Agora in Cleveland. The two projects rose in the latter half of the 2010s after years toiling in the Philly underground, so when the two bands play for each other, their mutual appreciation shines. That’s what cues people into the idea that Philly is a good city for starting a band.

While Mannequin Pussy’s fiery punk is still foundational to the band’s recordings and performances, they’re just as likely to drift into other stylings. One of the band’s most enduring hits, “Drunk II,” inhabits an emo-indie rock interstitial space that has won over fans of both classic indie and heavy music. Now, on I Got Heaven, Mannequin Pussy careens between fast-paced hardcore and contemplative post-punk without sacrificing vitality to fit into any kind of genre mold. The lane that Mannequin Pussy occupies in I Got Heaven is not unlike the the sounds they tested on 2019’s Patience or their 2021 EP Perfect, but there’s a stylistic growth that’s especially potent on “I Don’t Know You:” it is the first Mannequin Pussy song that one could call elegant. It’s hard to believe this is the same Mannequin Pussy that released a self-titled album—a brief and entirely punk foray—10 years ago, given the variety of styles they play and play well.

I Got Heaven marks the first time that Mannequin Pussy decamped from their southeast Pennsylvania base of operations to Los Angeles make music with the help of storied producer John Congleton, the producer behind some of indie’s biggest heaters from Sleater-Kinney, Bully and Explosions in the Sky. For a band that never took themselves too seriously as people but treated their craft with the utmost sincerity, it turned out to be a match made in heaven. “Brett [the owner of Epitaph Records] saw the potential for that partnership. He was forthcoming that he thought we should leave Philadelphia and make a destination record,” Marisa explains. Congleton had a similar approach to the process as the members of Mannequin Pussy: Everyone in that room treats the songwriting craft and development process with inspiring rigor, going so far as to assign each other homework after sessions. But their senses of humor aligned so well that the process felt perfectly natural.

While I Got Heaven has echoes of those humorous moments throughout, the album’s title calls attention to religion, and experiences navigating American Christian hypocrisy are laced throughout. The frenetic punk title track opens in a state of spiritual crisis with Marisa yelling absurd questions: “And what if we stopped spinning / And what if we’re just flat? / And what if Jesus himself ate my fucking snatch?” Before long, she reaches her dispiriting conclusion: “It is vileness wrapped up and disguised as happy endings.” “My experience with religion is quite atypical,” Marisa says. In Connecticut, she grew up in a family that left Roman Catholicism—a more mainstream Christian sect—for a congregationalist community that was open and affirming. Marisa was used to the idea that worship communities were progressive until she left for college and met classmates who grew up in more traditional faiths—women who’d experienced all kinds of shame associated with expected chastity, people who’d been subjected to conversion therapy in a Christian context. She had to unlearn her own faith to understand just how religious texts and edicts can be interpreted differently, even used as a weapon against people on the margins.

“It’s definitely control through fear,” Bear adds, recounting how his mother put him in Catholic school at a young age, he jokes, because she thought it would teach him humility. He was an altar boy for years, but he identifies his experience watching Malcolm X in middle school with a sudden curiosity about religions beyond his knowledge. The mere concept of other religious traditions, or how they intersect with race and politics, did not cross his mind until that moment. When he asked his teachers or his mother about other traditions, like Islam in the United States and abroad, he got nowhere. “I didn’t end up finishing my confirmation,” he explains. “They taught me just one line to get to holiness and be a normal citizen. As you meet other people in the world, you realize there are so many other ways to live and be happy.”

While Congleton helped tease out the thematic and sonic factors that have always made Mannequin Pussy an engaging listen, the band’s comfort in collaboration keeps the song machine running. When asked how any song on I Got Heaven came about, the foursome all glance at each other and smile before saying: “It kind of just happened.” The details show just how “that” happens. Take “Loud Bark,” for example: Maxine initially played with some propulsive rhythmic lines on her computer, sensing the emergence of a song that could go in a gothic synthwave direction. When she brought it to the studio the next morning, the band ran with it, molding it into the explosive punk song it became. “That’s the exciting thing about being with creative collaborators,” Marisa adds. “When one person has an idea, everyone has space to respond. It’s called playing music because it’s play. It’s work, sure, but we’re playing with sounds and textures.”

As lead vocalist and lead guitarist, respectively, Dabice and Steen have a particularly strong creative bond, but sometimes songs fall into place a little differently. “OK! OK? OK! OK?” fits that bill. Marisa initially started with a Valley Girl affectation partly in jest, but Reading ran with it and offered a heavy, throbbing drum beat to push it forward. Bear and Steen then locked eyes and toyed with their own respective sounds, with Bear unleashing a chugging breakdown that serves as the cornerstone for an explosive punk track where he also commands the vocals. “I Don’t Know You” sounds totally different on its face, with Dabice’s foggy vocals and Steen’s shimmering synths, but Dabice plays her guitar in D-standard tuning to open it up. Audiences are prone to hearing D-standard in aggressive hardcore but, in this more contemplative context, it brings forth a tension that never combusts but resolves in intense curiosity.

Mannequin Pussy bring together a lot of feelings and sounds on I Got Heaven, so when they think about what they hope their audience gets out of the record, their heads visit different places. “We go through a lot of the same things no matter where we come from or who we are,” Marisa says, after noting that her mood often correlates to the riffs she shreds. “I want people to relate to it.” “It’s also horny,” Bear interjects, setting off a tidal wave of laughter. “We spend a lot of time out on the road with no lovin’,” Maxine says, with a spoonful of French Onion Soup in one hand. “We feel a lot of yearning and passion.”

I Got Heaven’s release is only half the story. At the start of April, Mannequin Pussy will embark on a two month-long tour, criss-crossing the continent—starting in Pennsylvania and ending in Pennsylvania with their good friends in Soul Glo. In major markets like Boston, they’ve sold out two nights already. It seems like, every day, a new date follows suit, confirming what the band suspected with this album all along: There is an audience eagerly awaiting them. For a band who’s relied on a cult following to move tickets and merch for so many years, that cult is starting to look pretty big. As exhausting as the road can be, the members of Mannequin Pussy all agree that the live show energy propels them forward: “You could ask ‘Where’s Bear?’ five minutes before we’re supposed to go on and I’m sleeping in the corner. I’ll be sleepy until the minute that show starts and the adrenaline hits immediately,” Bear says. “There’s been times where I’ve had a long day of driving or even a hard soundcheck and the minute we get the crowd’s reaction to the first song can turn a dark day around.”

On the road, the band is happy to indulge in regional fast food, like Cookout in North Carolina, McDonald’s in Canada (way different menu, trust me), or FEBO in The Netherlands. As fun as that can be, what Mannequin Pussy really looks forward to is the day-off feast. “When we have a day off from touring, we’ll book an AirBnB with the other band and cook a family meal.” It’s these comforts that help keep the band rooted and celebratory. Back home in Philadelphia, though, everyone agrees: Hardena in South Philly hits the spot. Johnny Brenda’s, our lunch spot, is another favorite; Maxine and Bear frequent it more often than Marisa and Kaleen, but the band knows everyone at the restaurant and they treat each other like family.

Ever since adopting the name Mannequin Pussy in 2010, the band has rarely been one to avoid controversy. Whether the issue is venues refusing to place their name on the marquees (automatic deal-breaker), former labels shorting them on royalties or basically any stance that one might reasonably expect a punk band with feminist, antiracist content to hold, confrontation has not been off the table. The band’s most recent controversy, the incorporation of artificial intelligence (AI) in the music video for “Nothing Like,” still has fans reeling. The move is perplexing, especially after the public outrage surrounding AI’s intended deployment as a labor and cost-cutting measure in creative industries like film and television continues to swell.

However odd the move may be, there’s little doubt that Mannequin Pussy have always gone there. They’re not afraid to challenge people who are afraid to say “pussy,” and now they refuse to work with venues who won’t display the full band name on the marquee. They were vocal about Tiny Engines’ royalty controversy in 2019, helping raise awareness about financial precarity in the music scene. Mannequin Pussy doesn’t let anything slide, even if it’s at the hands of the label that put out their first two LPs, and I Got Heaven is yet another feather in the cap of a band on a mission to uncover a better world and what path it takes to get there. Like the rest of us, they don’t have all the answers, but they’re forging their own militant communities with every tour, every show and every song.

After lunch, we pile into each other’s cars to pay a visit to Launderette Records, a must-see in Port Richmond. For a neighborhood with a punk reputation, Launderette’s selection is one of the broadest I’ve seen in the city. It also happens to be home to the burning globe on the cover of Patience. Basking in the charred aura of the globe, next to a mint copy of the album, it feels like Mannequin Pussy has grown as collaborators and as professionals. Their sound is the right balance of edgy and polished. They’re seasoned enough on the road to make their constant touring life sound almost easy. They know what to expect from each other in the studio or on the stage. These are professional punks; they walk with a comfort and whimsy that suggests that they know they’re cool and don’t care. It shines through on I’ve Got Heaven. It’s something to behold.

Devon Chodzin is a critic and urban planner with bylines at Aquarium Drunkard, Bandcamp Daily, Slumber Mag and more. He is currently a student in Philadelphia. He lives on Twitter @bigugly.