Never Hungover Again at Age Five

For an album so largely defined by its emotional awareness, Joyce Manor’s Never Hungover Again opens with what is possibly the stupidest couplet of all time. “Looking at your face in the dark/You don’t even look that smart,” vocalist Barry Johnson bellows, buoyed by a pounding drumbeat and enormous power chords that belie his desperation. The band drops out for what feels like a millisecond—a subdued rhythm section and Johnson’s whine-shout-singing tiptoe clumsily along until the guitars swell back up again, just in time to remind us that this is, in fact, a pop punk song. By the time Johnson admits that he “think[s] about it still,” his relationship has fallen apart, his dumb-looking partner disappeared into the crowd. This opening track, “Christmas Card,” creates an entire world within its two minutes and five seconds: a world of missed opportunities, of unnecessary details remembered as canon, of pop punk’s regret without its misogyny and misplaced anger (“you don’t even look that smart” might be a low blow, but it’s presented as a moment of confusion rather than hatred). Much of Never Hungover Again exists in this space, a realm that delivers the emotion promised by the “emo” genre tag without the egotistic distortion of those emotions.

By the time Never Hungover Again’s nineteen glorious minutes found their way into emo’s collective consciousness on July 21st, 2014, the album’s existence was almost preordained. Joyce Manor had been making music for six years; emo music had been around for over four times that long. Nothing about Joyce Manor’s third album is revelatory: emo has certainly produced works more influential, more gorgeous, more weird in its long and troubled history. Even Joyce Manor has seemingly disavowed the imperfections of Never Hungover Again, replacing its clumsiness and emotional vulnerability with the safe, near-sterile pop music of 2016’s Cody and last year’s Million Dollars To Kill Me. However, the blueprint Never Hungover Again lays for an emo revival in the twenty-first century is essential, even five years after its release.

At its core, Never Hungover Again is an album about love, loss, and horniness, an album that opens by lamenting the loss of a past love and ends with the bliss in Barry Johnson’s voice as he sings, “as you lay next to me by the heated swimming pool.” The emotions in Never Hungover Again are rarely complicated or unique, and they are almost never presented as such. “Heart Tattoo” crafts its titular ink as a physical manifestation of the pain, ugliness, and beauty of love, while “Falling in Love Again” deals with the awkwardness and dumbfounded affection that accompany a new relationship. “Catalina Fight Song” and “In the Army Now,” the album’s two heaviest tracks, trace the path from childhood innocence to adult misery, both presenting that transition as inherently violent. These ten songs rarely meander past surface-level introspection or speculation, but more importantly they allow Joyce Manor to sit with their emotions, accepting anxieties and joys for what they are without searching for an ex to blame or make jealous.

The “emo revival” scene, meant to recapture emo’s original sound as it was established in the early ‘90s, is flooded with acts like Mom Jeans. and Modern Baseball: bands who craft emotional landscapes composed mostly of getting high and getting sad about high school crushes. Emo’s very name implies angst and inspires derision rather than pointing to the genre’s original goal: using emotional vulnerability as an escape from the toxic masculinity of the hardcore punk scene. It should come as no surprise, then, that in its 30-plus years of existence emo has come full-circle many times over. The toxic masculinity it sought to distance itself from has largely become the genre’s defining feature, allowing men to revel in their own harmful attitudes under the guise of “emotional vulnerability,” a phrase that in the context of bands like Modern Baseball means little more than self-loathing and misanthropy. The “relatability” these artists peddle is a woe-is-me approach to interpersonal relationships, one driven by base desires to blame and attack while stemming from an inability to truly sit with uncomfortable feelings like loss and guilt.

Although most of the “emo revival” bands ape emo’s original sounds well enough, few seem to recognize the original intent of emo music, a point that Never Hungover Again makes exceedingly clear. The music video of Modern Baseball’s “Your Graduation” provides an especially stark contrast to the interpersonal relationships presented in Never Hungover Again. The video features Brendan Lukens, the band’s lead singer, in bed with a rotating cast of women, meant to portray the mundanity of sex outside of the relationship for which Lukens so clearly yearns. However, these women are nameless—practically faceless—props used in the name of relatability. Although the people in Never Hungover Again are largely unnamed (with the exception of “Victoria”’s titular woman), they are essential to the worlds the music creates. The friends in “Schley” fill the song’s bleak streets and defaced telephone books just as “Catalina Fight Song” reckons with the void left by growing apart from old friends. Joyce Manor does not make music centered on pushing emotions onto others, and in avoiding this tendency, they allow the people surrounding them the personhood they deserve.

Five years removed from its release, Never Hungover Againhas done little to change the landscape of emo music, perhaps because nothing about the album is especially groundbreaking. Musically, Joyce Manor rely on the same amalgam of post-punk and power pop that has been around longer than Weezer; lyrically, lines like, “I think you’re funny/I like your friends/I like the way they treat you” (from “Falling in Love Again”) inspire little confidence in Johnson’s prowess as a poet. However, over the course of their third album, Joyce Manor allow their emotions to simply exist, an impressive feat given the pressures of being in an emo band. Rather than looking to settle past scores or provoke future envy, Never Hungover Again finds Joyce Manor being present in every moment. The emotions throughout Never Hungover Again are “emo” in the original sense of the word—they push back against the prevailing trends of the scene from which they were born, reveling in the simple act of existing. The confusion that drives “Christmas Card” isn’t presented as the fault of a now-bygone lover; as the relationship of “End of the Summer” fades, it is replaced by neither scorn nor resentment. Never Hungover Again’s finale, “Heated Swimming Pool” is strikingly inconclusive—nothing is promised by the joy felt in a single moment—but Joyce Manor never strive to offer a conclusion. To them, sitting by the heated swimming pool is good enough.