“To be feminine,” singer and guitarist Marisa Dabice recently said, speaking historically and contemporaneously, “is profane.” If Dabice and her bandmates celebrated that profanity over a decade ago when they christened their band Mannequin Pussy, their new album, I Got Heaven, is a bacchanal. It’s a mouthy, messy, self-assured record that seeks out conventions primarily to taunt them—genre and social conventions, sure, but also the conventional wisdom that says the delicate flower of a woman’s desire wilts if removed from its man-made greenhouse. Like Hole’s Live Through This, perhaps its closest antecedent, it revels in its most uncomfortable contradictions. It shows its ugliest face, and it always comes out on top. It’s hard to imagine an indie-rock record better suited for the moment.
There is nothing on I Got Heaven like the slick romantic catharsis of “Drunk II,” the instant-classic single from the band’s 2019 album Patience. “I still love you, you stupid fuck,” Dabice sings to cap the first verse. That line became something like the band’s calling card, whether wittingly or not, the kind of punchline you spend an entire concert waiting to scream back. It’s vulnerable, almost affectionate, but its power relies on the protagonist’s feeling beholden to someone else against her wishes, if not her will. The stupid “fucks” on I Got Heaven, meanwhile, come from the act of fucking itself, experienced gleefully by people willing to risk their independence and self-sufficiency if it means getting theirs. When Dabice sings, “Rewind yourself, get me off, make me feel so elite,” it’s basically impossible to imagine her ever singing “Drunk II” again.
I Got Heaven is at its best when Mannequin Pussy laugh their way past feeling conflicted. In the title track, Dabice is a dog panting at the knee of a stranger, equally ready to bite or hump depending on how things go. By the time the chorus comes around, though, she’s practically cooing. “Oh, I’m an angel,” she sings, “I was sent here to bring you company.” It’s not a negation of the fantasy—in the very next verse, she wonders aloud what it would be like if “Jesus himself ate my fucking snatch,” her voice nearly breaking into a moan—but an acknowledgment that even a woman playing the dominant hornball role still has to navigate the men who think the whole thing is their gift.
Not that it stops her. “I keep all of my sugar where I know you like it best,” she promises in the very next song. She rides the chorus of “Loud Bark,” her voice rising as it builds toward the climax. “I’ve got a loud bark, deep bite,” she sings over and over, over and over, as the song approaches ecstasy. The twinned meanings of her words tumble over one another, vying for dominance: She wants you to fuck off, she wants to turn you on. Of course, screams of pleasure and screams of pain sometimes feel similar. Bites, too. Desire and fear, connection and protection—when they can’t be separated, why not go with what feels best? “Just tell me what you need!” she shouts in “Aching,” a gasp of frustration and a promise of service all at once. Nearly every line on I Got Heaven is both a come-on and a warning.
Appropriately enough, I Got Heaven is an intensely pleasurable album, and far more adventurous than anything Mannequin Pussy have tried before. Over brushed drums in “I Don’t Know You,” Dabice carries the torch for a distant lover whose secrets she holds close, her voice rising with bruised pride only to fall away. It’s a gorgeous melody, rich with the kind of strident heartbreak Neko Case distills on her best songs, shadow-lit by flickering synths from new member Maxine Steen. “Nothing Like” plays out like VH1 delivered through a choppy antenna signal, its distorted disco beat and the suck of Kaleen Reading’s hi-hats nicked from “Lovefool,” its strummy verses a blown-out take on “Kiss Me.” The heavy crunch of Steen’s guitar in “Sometimes” could’ve been taped off of alt-rock radio 30 years ago; tune your dial just right and you might hear a bit of “Everlong” after the chorus. Even the pummel of the title track is tickled by a synth line from Steen that’s more Fountains of Wayne than Suicide.
Delightfully, even as they’ve become comfortable with straying wherever a good song takes them, Mannequin Pussy have somehow become a better punk band, too. In bassist Colins Regisford’s “OK? OK! OK? OK!,” they shift the rhythm constantly, charging then shuffling, prodding for weaknesses before running a battering ram through the coda. “Of Her,” Dabice’s tribute to her mom, never stops accelerating, its 90 seconds of momentum made supersonic by lightning streaks of feedback and rattles of amplifier clutter. “She gave me her control!” Dabice shouts, and the word “control” echoes and fades and hangs around like smoke in a tiny room, only disappearing fully when the band hits the lights on the way out.
Though all three of I Got Heaven’s hardcore songs appear in the album’s back half, they don’t feel like a back-to-basics reset or an attempt to reestablish the band’s bona fides. They function as release valves, rushes of pure pleasure hissing as they escape the tensions of the songs around them. “You’re gonna fuckin’ beg, and heel, and learn,” Regisford sings in “OK? OK! OK? OK!,” both a command and an encouragement. On an album about wanting things badly but not being able to shake the consequences of wanting them, these songs’ straightforward, uncomplicated adrenaline is an ecstatic relief: Throw your body around, let it hit what it hits, then get your shit together. Still, they’re only one piece of a much more complex picture. Aesthetically speaking, punk is no longer the core of this band; like humor in a relationship, it’s just one of the many things holding it all together.
This is a way of saying that I Got Heaven is a pop album. It operates by a pop album’s rules; it’s unashamed of its ambition and unselfconscious of its artifice, and in that way it’s a perfect reflection of its own thematic commitment to self-definition. The vulnerability that’s always made Mannequin Pussy’s music feel personal and urgent has now given them the freedom to expand in unexpected ways and discover what else they might be able to contain. It never feels like pure product; it’s too moist, too clammy, far too impolite. Like Turnstile’s Glow On, I Got Heaven moves with an intuitive grace that makes it feel stadium-sized without losing its nuance or its grounding in the scene that birthed it. It’s easy to love, and it knows it.
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