Joyce Manor are California pop-punk legends and I Used To Go To This Bar is this epochal band operating at the top of their game. They continue to deliver relentlessly satisfying rock music in a manner that makes it look simply effortless. The Torrance, California-hailing trio of Barry Johnson, Chase Knobbe, and Matt Ebert are at a point in their career where their position as one of the most beloved rock bands is a foregone conclusion. Their seventh album, produced by Brett Gurewitz (of Bad Religion and Epitaph Records CEO) finds the group continuing to find rich new veins to tap in their short-and-sweet songcraft without losing an ounce of bite that gained them such repute in the first place. A bustle of activity that followed the release of 2022’s excellent 40 Oz. to Fresno and included an instantly memorable appearance on John Mulaney’s Everybody’s in L.A. and a retrospective assessment of the group’s seminal 2011 self-titled debut as part of Pitchfork’s esteemed Sunday Review series. The band’s had a whirlwind touring schedule over the last few years, which has included an outing with Weezer and multiple sold-out shows at the legendary California venues Hollywood Palladium (including a guest performance by Mark Hoppus for the fan favorite “Heart Tattoo”) and Long Beach Arena. This new record retains the band’s penchant for punchy hooks while sounding fuller, more in-your-face, and all-around bigger than ever, with an all-star crew of collaborators along for this wild ride. Along with mixing pro Tony Hoffer (M83, Beck), behind-the-boards legend Tom Lord-Alge lent his Enema of the State engineer magic to several I Used To Go To This Bar cuts, including the first single “All My Friends Are So Depressed.” The album also features a rotating cast of drummers, including touring drummer Jared Shavelson, Social Distortion’s David Hildago, Jr., and Joey Waronker—the latter of whom is currently hitting the skins for Oasis’ reunion tour.
“Speaking for myself, this record might be a snapshot of me deciding whether I’m going to live out the rest of my life as Eckhart Tolle or live out the rest of my life as Ted Kaczynski,” laughs PROPAGANDHI guitarist and vocalist Chris Hannah. In true PROPAGANDHI fashion, the Manitoba, Canada based outfit’s eighth album, At Peace is smart music for dangerous times. “Everything I’m singing about is still coming from being the same person that wrote and sang our first record How to Clean Everything in 1993,” Hannah states recalling the band’s snarky skate-thrash origins. “But what we’re putting into the songs now, probably reflects more despair than 30 years ago when we had similar perspectives, but with strands of hope and naivete. Now it’s the existential dread of eking out a life worth living in this completely failed society.” At Peace was written and recorded as political storm clouds were beginning to darken in the months before Emperor Trump’s ascent to power. It’s an album of poetic and polemic songs written shortly before the American oligarch’s suggestion that PROPAGANDHI’s home country become the U.S.’s 51st State. Songs like the album’s apocryphal “Fire Season” presages the climate-change-driven wildfires that wiped out portions of Southern California. At its core, At Peace is an album of inconvenient and unavoidable truths that hit with all the subtlety of an Orwellian boot stamping on a human face forever.