In her autobiography, Hole drummer Patty Schemel recounts the sight of Courtney Love standing at the foot of the stage in a ripped dress night after night, one bare leg propped up on a monitor: a “radiant nightmare,” in her words. There might not be a more appropriate term for the archetype Love thanklessly wished to embody, of a woman embracing the messy, impetuous, embarrassing, ugly rawness for which so many men in rock music were respected. Her legacy is flawed; flaws were the point. Thirty years later, we’ve become at least a little more accepting of blemishes.
“Radiant nightmare” perfectly sums up Marisa Dabice in the video for the title track off Mannequin Pussy’s excellent fourth LP. While the rest of the band gamely jams around a farm family and their crops, Dabice’s energy inevitably pulls the gaze. The thing is, that gaze can’t wholly grasp her because she doesn’t stop moving for a second. In some shots she’s lying upside down possessed on a hay bale, eyes closed and pulling her face. In others she’s nearly naked, her breasts obscured by a coat of black, body-length hair extensions. Near the end she’s chasing the God worshippers like La Llorona incarnate, corralling them into a shed as if they were their livestock. All the while the camera whips wildly around her visage, wounding the psyche.
Mannequin Pussy, from its algorithm-disapproved name on down, is a band constantly in search of what it means to maintain agency over your wellness. Dabice is no stranger to that war. She once resigned to give it up to raging cancerous cells in her soft tissue as a teenager; as a young adult, she fought against losing herself to emotional and physical abuse from romantic partners. She pours her pain into the songs, so much so that some of them are too raw to play live anymore, but the universality of that ache comes through so effectively that her band has blossomed into one of the best punk acts in America.
I Got Heaven follows two years of relentless touring after the release of their Perfect EP, which followed another year of relentless touring after 2019’s breakthrough LP Patience, all of which would be exhausting even if the band didn’t have to hold down day jobs during the downtime. Yet the fact that half of these tracks are monsters shows that this band is still pushing itself to its limits. Side B is littered with these mosh-makers, in many forms: “OK? OK! OK? OK!” captures the familiar anxiety of being pummeled with information; “Of Her” is a gracious acknowledgment of parental suffering; “Aching” is the urge for uncompromised romance made manifest. Many of these see Dabice and bassist Colins “Bear” Regisford volleying vocals, their voices slamming into each other appropriately.
But besides that blistering title track, it’s the record’s relatively chiller numbers that bring the most heat, perhaps because it’s easier to observe the band’s pieces moving. The best among them is the hair-raising “I Don’t Know You,” on which Kaleen Reading’s brushed drums and Regisford’s bass keep the tension thick while Maxine Steen’s ethereal synths augment the drums underneath Dabice’s reverberant vocals. Then the guitar shifts from a rumble to a roar halfway through, but there’s no climax, just a taut sense of menace wrapped in an earworm of a chorus.
Elsewhere, the brisk “Sometimes” shimmers rather than rages, briefly rising in volume on its choruses in a classic alternative loud-soft tradeoff. Regisford smartly drops out after the band explodes on the bridge, and then comes back in to supplement the momentum as the track coasts to an end. “Loud Bark” is similarly bimodal, with measured mid-tempo verses that morph into a fierce outro as Dabice steadily unloads her snarl. “Nothing Like,” meanwhile, is the furthest the band shifts toward pop as Reading’s drums shuffle like the disfigured AI generations of its accompanying video.
Let’s talk about that AI video for a second, because it brought about the band’s first significant experience with pushback. Leaving aside the controversy surrounding AI — a topic that perhaps deserves more nuance than what Twitter X users typically offer — the video already fails in how its visuals, equal parts horrifying and hilarious, overwhelm the power of the song itself, which is the opposite of what a video should do. It succeeds, however, as a cerebral continuation of the themes explored in the record’s other videos, all of which cohere thematically. Its characters are iconic representations of women in American media garbled by a nascent cold technology that, like the male gaze, robs its subjects of their humanity. There’s a biting irony in how those generated images, allegedly drawn and painstakingly redrawn by artist Connor Clark, are still culled from the works of other artists who can’t yet consent to their use. Talk about loss of agency.
It’s a small misstep from an act that generally doesn’t do wrong. The only other conceivable one is that, for its stellar execution, the record might not satisfy those who want to see other aspects of the band revealed. (Then again, they’d be ignoring the additions of new member Steen, especially since the title track comes from one of her demos.) But what else do you want from your punk bands? The brilliance of Mannequin Pussy is that they write beautifully simple songs with so much verve that they leave no room for self-doubt. I Got Heaven is stacked with them top to bottom. Shout them skyward, and give God an earful.
Support I Got Heaven on Bandcamp and visit the Mannequin Pussy website for updates on touring and merch.