REVIEW: Joyce Manor - I Used to Go to This Bar

One of the worst bands of the 2010s surprises us all with their least tragic record to date. Praise be.

19:09 // January 30th, 2026 // Epitaph

I’m all about giving individual records a fair hearing (as you shall see), but Joyce Manor are a mercifully rare act that make me deeply embarrassed for their entire audience; anything they release gets guaranteed rotation out of sheer masochism. Don’t make that face at me. Some music deserves proud haters — and can you name any fairer game than suburbanite dreck whose perpetually waning lifeforce flows from the same sewage pipeline that burst in the mid-90s with Weezer’s commercial advent and has never been adequately patched up since?

Joyce Manor are hardly unique in their tenuously ‘punk’ pity-party malaise, bogged down in present-tense dissatisfaction and glossed with the sickly sheen of past-tense nostalgia. They’re certainly not the first to prop this up with endless overtures to Real Life – see their polaroid-esque artwork and painstakingly candid lyricism – as though their banal commentary on wasting one’s life on loneliness and nostalgia is any more compelling for its documentary value. However, they might be in a class of their own when it comes to the greatest of all crimes: making a career out of guitar pop with hardly a single enduring hook to show for it.

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what makes their songs so queasily un-catchy: the rarity with which they stick around long enough to lay down a coherent chorus hardly helps, nor do their asinine melodies, nor indeed does their old habit of playing aimless shrapnel guitar leads over verses in which they have no natural role. These all play a part, but I feel they’re all in the orbit of a sense of bottom-of-the-barrel inertia the band have built their name on.

What does one do to this music but mooch and wallow? When, say, Jeff Rosenstock blasts off with an eviscerating teardown of his (and your?) capacity for meaningful growth, there’s such bite to his commentary that just hearing it is enough to break the consumer mindset and make you check yourself. For Joyce Manor, writing off the capacity for meaningful growth is the consumer mindset, and the more passively you chew over their fatalistic depictions of arrested development, depression and anxiety, the more mileage you’ll get from them. Doesn’t it speak volumes that the band were forced to clarify that their popular song wasn’t written from the perspective of a dog? Behind the punk power pop veneer, the lack of agency or impetus in their work is startling. This was all too apparent on 2022’s 40 Oz. to Fresno, a record touted by many as a return-to-form of sorts; all I could think was that I’d never heard such a dearth of energy on a punk record before.

And so it goes. However, now that any fans have hopefully left the building, I hope you’ll appreciate the shock I felt on making it through I Used to Go to This Bar and realising that the impossible has happened: Joyce Manor have made a solid effort at a rock album that lives and dies without resorting to the same emo bulimia of their early work or the navel-gazing townie angst of 2016’s Cody (just think of the levels of parody we’d reserve in 2026 for a Phoebe Bridgers feature on a song titled “Do You Really Want To Not Get Better?”).

What happened to these guys? This record starts with a bang, ends as though teasing an encore, and its tracklist is made up of more self-assured songs than desperate cries for help; if it forgets to have a middle, then we’ve learned to live with worse.

Have they always been capable of this? Have they always been able to tap into songwriting as snappy as opener “I Know Where Mark Chen Lives”, which dials in razor-sharp verse/chorus transitions and sticks the landing with a strong hook (even if it’s practically a tribute to At the Drive-In’s “Enfilade”)? When did their once-sloppy rock arrangements start to cut with as much precision as the guitar hook that carries the title-track (something has to — that lead vocal is unobtrusive as anything)? Who told these guys that the most reliable way to fend off solipsism was to shove as much heart and melody as possible into an old-fashioned call-and-response chorus (”Well, Whatever It Was”)? Never mind the CCM-adjacent jingle of those verses, no one can say you’re stuck in your head if the rest of the band are already singing along! Even at the points where Johnson is clearly not over his woe-is-me rigamole…

Hit the bong, wrote a song.
Fell asleep for way too long.
Wore a dress, Last Caress.
All my friends are so depressed.

…then it sounds a good deal less mawkish wrapped in tunes that don’t pretend to be anything other than an unapologetic downer.

This newfound knack for a convincing downer sees Joyce Manor follow a similar recent trajectory to their contemporaries PUP, embracing both real-life and creative stagnancy with the most appropriate genre for a late-thirties burnout: alternative country. As with PUP, where a morose look in the mirror last year was a welcome change from the flailing self-parody of their previous outing The Unraveling of PUPTHEBAND, it’s a wonder how much more gravity the likes of “The Opossum” and (most obviously) “All My Friends Are So Depressed” carry for a little downbeat twang. Not only do these tracks take this defeatist indie-yeehaw aesthetic in their stride, but having a little more stylistic breadth on the table does wonders for the tracklist as a whole: never have individual tracks on a Joyce Manor album been so memorable.

Unfortunately, floating the prospect of a fully developed tracklist ultimately works against I Used to Go to This Bar. This is in part because its tracklist is too short to get away with such clunkers as the aptly-named “Well, Don’t It Seem Like You’ve Been Here Before?” (a tiresome rehash of emo cliches) or “Falling Into It” (a classic Joyce Manor boneless non-starter), but mainly because the band have finally grown to the point that their emotional reality is too large and too complex to fit into nineteen minutes of off-the-cuff songlets, however snappily crafted.

This may not have been the case when their entire scope fell under late-adolescent restlessness, or later on when they grappled with the terror of bungling the relationships that were supposed to sustain their adult lives, but I Used to Go to This Bar‘s scope is broader and has less resonance to take for granted: people age/life reluctantly goes on/your friends make their beds with their jobs and spouses/you do the same with your shitty rock band/etcetc., and as it all happens, the Narrative begins to demand a comprehensive scope that this set of hyperspecific vignettes cannot and does not dish out over a tracklist this skinny (other than “All My Friends Are So Depressed”, where Johnson quickly paints us the big picture only to drop it in his kitchen sink).

And so, highlight closer “Grey Guitar” notwithstanding, I find myself coming out of this album feeling unusually short-changed by a Joyce Manor record — and if that’s in part a reflection of how I’m no longer counting down the seconds for it to end, then it still sounds cursory and underwhelming by the standards of their peers (WORRY. this is not). Still, some will rightly call it their best record in years, and I’d be the last to contradict them. Maybe there is something to be said for spending your ‘20s setting yourself up to fail, only to get your act together for a late play.

5.5/10