Their follow-up, 2016’s Romantic, takes the base components of GP and pushes them to the extremes their urgent playstyle demands. Everything’s faster, meatier and louder. Pop cuts like Emotional High and Denial are hookier than anything on GP, but Marisa sounds like she’s physically trembling while singing the latter. The album’s speed is its premiere feature. The band, drunk on adrenaline and binging on distortion, and Marisa, bursting at the seams with the compulsion to yell what’s been haunting her, emulate a sports car gunning down a back alley while the breaks are cut. The hardcore burners just crash into the shoegaze thumpers, and the songs that follow are birthed from the wreckage, smoldering composites of the two styles. It sounds dangerous, impulsive, reactionary, primal, freeing, cathartic and totally restless.
In a stark juxtaposition, the first memorable line on their new album is literally the word “patience,” drawn out melodically during the record’s titular intro. The word became a mantra for Marisa and her bandmates during the record’s marathon creation.
“Because every time I would be, like, literally crying to someone about the situation I was in,” Marisa says, “They would always say, ‘You have to just have patience.’ And I was just so pissed off with hearing that word again and again and again. But I realized, ‘Yeah, I guess you’re right.’ So it kind of seemed like this perfect tongue-in-cheek album title.”
According to Marisa, Mannequin Pussy signed to Tiny Engines in 2014 via a handshake deal, but the label walked back on that right before they released Romantic, the album that would make Mannequin Pussy a band with a buzz surrounding them. Shortly after the record dropped, and the band had reluctantly signed a contract for a third album, Epitaph approached Mannequin Pussy to join their roster. Marisa says it took two years for the labels to negotiate a buyout, and in that state of helplessness the band continued to tour relentlessly.
With the future of their career up in the air (given the opportunities Epitaph could potentially provide them, but the buyout taking forever) they eventually decided to just record Patience with the budget Tiny Engines gave them, despite their aspirations for something grander.
“So we did that and then when we listened back to it we were like, ‘Fuck,’” Marisa says. “It just wasn’t what I wanted. It sounded too sonically similar to Romantic. I wanted to make a big-ass sounding rock record that felt clean -- but not too clean. Polished, but could fall apart at any moment.”
In this cinematically low point in the band’s storyline, they were approached by Pennsylvania producer/engineer Wil Tip (Code Orange, The Menzingers, Turnstile), who heard that they were yearning to re-record their album through Mannequin Pussy’s then-tourmates in Turnover (who’ve recorded with Yip for years). “Wil knew about this entire situation and said, ‘I don’t care how much you’re gonna be able to pay me, I just want to work on this record.’”
Yip ended up being the ideal producer for the band’s vision, resulting in a work that’s tighter and less chaotic than their other albums, but with plenty of room in the mix to accommodate their diversified sound. There’re the obligatory pop-punches (Patience, Who Are You, Cream) and a healthy dose of push-pit fodder (Drunk I, Clams, F.U.C.A.W.). But the real gems arrive when Mannequin Pussy expand beyond what they’ve already done so well in the past.