2024

British-American author and philosopher Alan Watts once said, “[y]ou are under no obligation to be the same person you were five minutes ago.” Bold words. As a symbol of the counter-culture, Watts is typically positioned as a spiritual thinker, espousing the boundless freedom of the present moment. Of course, things are rarely just one thing. An alternative read frames change as inevitable rather than chosen. Depending on the philosophical waters you wade in, change as a universal constant is nothing new. Still, considering the potential freedom that stems from change, the ability to assert personal agency over one’s transformation presents an opportunity for inquiry. Change as a potential choice might be a small part of the broader cosmic tapestry. Impermanence asks bigger questions and demands complicated answers.

Philadelphia’s Mannequin Pussy smash several lifetimes of change into thirty scorching minutes on I Got Heaven. At a blistering ten songs, I Got Heaven is a master class in playing with confessional sludge — punk meditations that wrap shoegaze sentimentality around raw tension. The album’s topography holds space for echoes of past fire starters: the muscular aggression of Hole, the pointed wisdom of Patti Smith, and even the explosiveness and heavy machinery of East Coast hardcore. Where 2019’s Patience and the 2021 E.P. Perfect found indie super-producer Will Yip celebrating Mannequin Pussy’s penchant for low-end drive, producer John Congleton edges the group towards a more open, and at times, spacey synthesis of their sound. As a result, there is a tempest-like flow that shines on I Got Heaven, a kind nocturnal drift and a newfound sense of melody that amplifies the band’s skull-crushing DNA. Songs start and resolve in very difference places. It’s as if The Smashing Pumpkins that wrote “1979” showed up on the back half of Garbage’s “Bad Boyfriend,” or an alternate timeline where Rachel Haden fronts Weezer on a sequel to Pinkerton.

Taken with this context, I Got Heaven shows off a bigger version of Mannequin Pussy, presenting the kind of album they were destined to make. The album’s title track explodes with lumbering guitar and cavernous drums as Marisa Dabice spews enough acid to burn down the entire patriarchy: “And what if wе stopped spinning? / And what if we’re just flat? / And what if Jesus himself ate my fucking snatch? / And what if I’m an angel? / Oh, what if I’m a bore? / And what if I was confident? / Would you just hate me more?” Flirting with the sacred and the profane, “I Got Heaven” showcases the group’s confidence in tearing down the old world. Here, change is inevitable, particularly when society’s support systems fail. By the time the song reaches its expansive coda, Dabice flips her demonization into strength, cast as a dog without a leash and ready to take no prisoners. She continues the metaphor on “Loud Bark” a song that builds from twinkling sensuality into a storm of power chords and throaty feedback (“I want to be a danger, I want to be adored / I want to walk around at night while being ignored / I’m such a romantic, I’m such a fucking tease / I keep you in my sugar and you eat it on your knees / I am a loud bark / Deep bite…”). History teaches that rage always bubbles over to overwhelm the ruling class. There’s no reason to fall in line when the structure is designed for cruelty. With the 1–2 punch of “I Got Heaven” and “Loud Bark,” Mannequin Pussy extols the virtues of showing that the bark matches the bite.

Feminist theory — examining systemic causes and effects of gender inequality — serves as essential inspiration throughout I Got Heaven. For Mannequin Pussy, combating male-coded control is a necessary starting point for social change. It also leads to their most aggressive music. “OK? OK! OK? OK!” is a scuzz-thrash barn burner, where the group brings the nasty riff back to flip the table on sexist oppressors (“You want a slice of heaven / You know what I want / You think this pussy’s easy / You’re gonna have to beg, and heel, and learn…”). Later, on “Of Her,” the group serves up a caustic mix of metallic grind and sinewy bass to curb stomp the pervasiveness of toxic power (“I was in control / Control, control / She gave me her control / Control, control…”). While it’s popular to say the personal is the political, I Got Heaven finds ways to elevate the true stakes of sexism — that the loss of self is simply too great. Anything that demands the erasure of our personhood cannot endure.

While politics inform the contours of our agency, it’s the personal where change truly manifests. Here, I Got Heaven takes on a more intimate approach, a kind of tenderness that explores the loss and grief that often accompanies transformation. “Nothing Like” features a snapping breakbeat set to power-pop fuzz while Dabice sings about co-creating a new world with someone special (“Oh, what’s wrong with dreaming of burning this all down? / If it’s what you want, I would give my life…”). This sledgehammer switch exemplifies Mannequin Pussy’s take on love, namely, that grand romantic gestures come with the weight of reality. Wine and roses are wonderful until you’re hung over and pricked with thorns. “I Don’t Know You” reflects on this trade off by exploring sex as love in the search for deep closeness. With hypnotic keyboards that bloom and decay into thick distortion, the group laments confusing a physical threshold with a gateway to an unlimited knowing (“I know a lot of things / But I don’t know you…”). Here, transformation and change are presented as new vistas, yielding unexpected truths. Mannequin Pussy continue to work with this notion on “Softly,” a song buoyed by crashing feedback and gentle harmonies before delivering one of the album’s hardest truths: “What if one day I don’t want this anymore? / What if one day I don’t want you anymore? / What If one day I don’t love you anymore?” Maybe love existed at one point but its ephemeral nature underscores that it is under no obligation to remain.

Considering love as a thing, an action, or both, Mannequin Pussy offer that its presence fundamentally changes us. During the album’s magnificent center piece, “Sometimes,” the group explores the idea of love twisting into self-betrayal, outlining the ways we inflict wounds on ourselves to keep a relationship alive, to transform for someone else and curry their affection. The song conjures images of self-immolation and pharmaceutical equilibrium against a muscular buzz saw crunch. Dabice coyly hints that these transgressions only occur “sometimes,” highlighting the danger and magnetic seduction of this thinking — that we are strong enough to remain ourselves in the face of undermining our values. “Sometimes” presents this slippery slope as Maxine Steen’s guitarwork suddenly opens into shimmering chemtrails that possess a galactic grandeur, highlighting the myopathy of this thinking at a cosmic level (”I’m a giver / I would give it all to you / Even if it meant that I would have to choose / Between my life and now it’s aging fast for you / Sometimes…”). The lines between agency and inevitability blur on “Sometimes.” The slow tragedy of transformation as destruction is not always the distinct product of a force of nature or our own sabotage. Sometimes, it’s both.

Listeners ultimately arrive at more unsettled terrain than where the album begins — that the most uncomfortable part of change is surrendering to the circumstances right in front of us. On the dizzying midtempo closer “Split Me Open,” Mannequin Pussy consider acquiesce in the face of facts too immense to alter. As half time strums give way to swirling waves, “Split Me Open” scans as the most vulnerable song here. The group chronicles the end of a relationship, letting the weight of that ending tear down any remnant of pretense. The song offers the possibility that saying yes to the end may mean a beginning for both in involved (“My body’s a temple / It was built for you / To do all the things you dreamed you’d do / With someone who deeply wants you / With someone…”). By the time listeners hit the bridge, Dabice’s howls of “[n]othing’s gonna change” serves as a twisted version of accepting the sum of all choices. Was the doom loop patterns that did these nameless lovers in? Co-dependency turned toxic? Mannequin Pussy keep the facts hidden but the feelings up front. By the time we reach the outgoing stanza (”Oh, it’s not the time / Oh, it’s not the place / I’m asking for time / I’m begging for space…”) listeners, like these lovers, can only stare forward and figure out how to pick up the pieces. How people choose to move forward from the aftermath suddenly takes on a profound significance.

Maybe Watts was on to something when he also said, “[t]his, then, is the human problem: there is a price to be paid for every increase in consciousness. We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain.” Perhaps this is where Mannequin Pussy rests at the conclusion of I Got Heaven — not at a place or destination but with inspiration in the face of the indeterminate. Change is surely linked with the pain of loss but also the potential for personal transformation offers a sacred kind of hope, a spirit and drive that could take us as far outside the people we thought we could be. After all, we’re under no obligation to remain stuck. We just need the time, the space, and the willingness to try something different in the face of uncertainty.

In addition to I Got Heaven, here are my other favorite releases from 2024:

• Alkaline Trio | Blood, Hair, and Eyeballs (Rise)
• Beabadobee | This Is How Tomorrow Moves (Dirty Hit)
• Bright Eyes | Five Dice, All Threes (Dead Oceans)
• Cassandra Jenkins | My Light, My Destroyer (Dead Oceans)
• Charli XCX | brat (Atlantic)
• Cigarettes After Sex | X’s (Partisan)
• The Cure | Songs From A Lost World (Lost Music / Fiction / Polydor)
• Father John Misty | Mahashmashana (Sub Pop)
• Faye Webster | Underdressed At The Symphony (Secretly Canadian)
• Gatecreeper | Dark Superstition (Nuclear Blast)
• Gouge Away | Deep Sage (Deathwish)
• Green Day | Saviors (Reprise / Warner)
• Kacey Musgraves | Deeper Well (MCA)
• Kendrick Lamar | GNX (PGLang / Interscope)
• Khruangbin | A LA SALA (Dead Oceans)
• Knocked Loose | You Won’t Go Before You’re Supposed To (Pure Noise)
• Laura Grace Jane | Hole In My Head (Polyvinyl)
• The Linda Lindas | No Obligation (Epitaph)
• Liquid Mike | Paul Bunyan’s Slingshot (Self-Released)
• Mannequin Pussy | I Got Heaven (Epitaph)
• Midwife | No Depression In Heaven (The Flenser)
• MJ Lenderman | Fireworks (Anti-)
• Origami Angel | Feeling Not Found (Counter Intuitive)
• Peter Cat Recording Co. | Beta (Peter Cat Publishing Pvt. Ltd.)
• SeeYouSpaceCowboy | Coup De Grace (Pure Noise)
• Sum 41 | Heaven :x: Hell (Rise)
• Vampire Weekend | Only God Was Above Us (Columbia)
• Vince Staples | Dark Times (Def Jam)
• Waxahatchee | Tigers Blood (Anti-)
• Wild Pink | Dulling the Horns (Fire Talk)

Originally published March 8, 2025 on Medium.