How Mannequin Pussy Found The Patience To Start All Over

By Michael Tedder


Punk is an elastic concept, spanning poppy odes to crushes, furious screeds against oppression, and every experimental rumination in between. The paradox of punk is that, within reason, some days doing the least punk thing is the most punk move of all.


So any time you're the Philadelphia punk sort Mannequin Pussy, and you've made your name with brash anthems like "Meat Slave 2" so you crammed 11 noisy songs into 17 joyful minutes on your 2016 breakout, Romantic, the most contrary move you can make could be to take a breath. Patience is a unexpected title for Mannequin Pussy's highly-anticipated third album and an altogether un-punk concept for a sound based around "go, go, go." Yet learning to take a beat was an idea that singer-guitarist Marisa Dabice had to learn to embrace. Whether she wanted to or not.


"I am so fucking impatient, yet I am attempting to change. If I have an idea, I immediately hope to spring into action, no matter what it is," she tells MTV News. "I heard something once that shook me, about the complete concept of a 'genius' being bullshit because true ideas just float around searching for a host body to bring them out into world. So in the event if you've an idea and don't do anything, the idea will leave you and go search for someone who can bring it out. So if I'm at residence and sitting around smoking marijuana and suddenly my brain begins going off on a weird pair of earrings I want to create or a t-shirt or whichever, I just go out, get the materials and do it, I don't wait for anyone to catch onto my idea. I just go it alone."


Of course, Mannequin Pussy is no solo project. Soon after reconnecting with childhood friend Athanasios Paul, the two formed the musical group in 2010, and released a flurry of homemade EPs. They went through some line-up changes, eventually settling into their current settings, which includes bassist Colins "Bear" Regisford and drummer Kaleen Reading (Paul switched from drums to guitar) and cut their first two albums (Romantic and their 2013 debut Gypsy Pervert) at marathon speed. "We spent two days in the studio on our first record, two or three weeks on Romantic," she says, "and fucking forever on Patience."


segment of Dabice’s aggravation with having to wait is that, in a way, she’s been making up for lost time since she was a teenager. Place on Earth in the Bronx, however raised in Connecticut, hers was not an idyllic childhood.


"I was a kid with a childhood cancer, so it gave me this sort of twisted worldview," she says. "To be 15 and think you could perish and still have to go to school daily and study for the SATs... I don't know, there’s something sort of hilarious about that to me right now. Life is intense and shitty most of time, so in case you don't find ways to laugh at your own misfortune then I just feel sorry for you."


That experience, she says, in a way stunted her emotional growth, and she didn't start playing music up until she was 24 as soon as, immediately after her mother had suffered a stroke, she moved from Colorado back to New York to take care of her. She soon noticed herself writing songs with Paul in her downtime as an outlet. Right after her mother stabilized and she grew tired of New York’s nonstop grind (which, because musicians are also busy attempting to create astronomical rent than music, she thinks makes for "lazy artists") the musical group decamped from New York to the more affordable Philadelphia, America's most vibrant rock-music city, one full of "incredibly talented weirdos," she says. She often sees Kurt Vile and Hop Along frontwoman Frances Quinlan just kinda hanging around.


Making Patience, Dabice had to slow things down for two reasons. The initial was a label concern: Mannequin Pussy's first two albums were released by the Carolina-based indie label Tiny Engines, best known for shepherding The Hotelier and Beach Slang into the world. The musical group had a "handshake deal" for two more albums, she says, although no real formal contract. Four months immediately after Romantic was released to rave reviews (Stereogum named it Album of the Week and Rolling Stone called the title track one of the best songs of the year), they were approached by Epitaph Records, the biggest independent punk label in the world.


As soon as Mannequin Pussy first met with the label, they learned that once its founder Brett Gurewitz first heard their name, he mentioned, "I'm glad not all of the good musical group names are taken." (Gurewitz is also a long-time member of Bad Religion, so he understands of what he speaks.) They determined to sign with Epitaph. The ensuing legal method of changing labels was drawn out, and not really a topic Dabice likes discussing that much: "I understand why feelings were hurt," she says. However, she felt it was a good possibility for them to get more exposure and support, talking about the label planned them complete freedom, and promised they "wouldn’t change a thing about our band."


Although even if their label didn't want them to change, Mannequin Pussy did — or at least, grow. That's the second reason: Mannequin Pussy recorded the album that eventually became Patience several years back, however eventually determined to throw that version out and try again.


"We first recorded Patience in the same studio as we did Romantic. And I love Romantic deeply, there isn't a thing I would switch on it. Although we didn't aspire to be stuck there," Dabice says. "That studio is in this huge warehouse with plenty of memories for me personally, and this time around it just felt so hard to concentrate there, to not be sucked into the past in a detrimental way."


Eventually, she accepted it was time to move on.


"We wanted a new challenge, a new perspective," she says. "The choice to re-record was one of the most tough decisions we've ever made as a musical group. It still makes me feel eccentric and like I let people I care about down. Yet in the end, this musical group is me, Thanasi, Kaleen, and Bear. The four of us need to feel inspired by what we make with each other and know it's our best possible work."


So they began again, this time with Will Yip, the Philadelphia-based producer known for giving ambitious punk groups like Title Fight and Turnstile just enough of a polish. Since their label situation was still unresolved, Yip agreed to do the recording on spec; Dabice says he just got paid two months back. "He's a weirdo Aquarius with an insane work ethic, which is like my main go to mixture of a person," she says. "I wanted it to still sound and feel like us, yet a graduated version of us."


Patience is a brilliant summertime rock album, one that finds the room for wistful, heartbroken indie pop gems like "Fear/+/Desire" and surging, sing-a-long anthems like "Who Are You," while also throwing down screaming firebombs like "Clams" and "Cream," which burn with the fury of prime riot grrrl cuts, yet with an added heft. THe album is hooky enough to not leave your head all summer, and hard enough to cut any detractors off at the path.


"I'm not really a large fan of shit that sounds also tidy, or also brilliant, however I am a fan of making something that sounds like it may would be on the radio, even if it never will be," Dabice says. She calls Yip a nurturing presence in the studio, one who helped draw new sides out of the musical group. "I never saw myself as a singer up until this record. A wild banshee, sure. Although a singer? No. Not up until right now


The album’s lead single, and the uncontested Song of the Summer in some circles, is "Drunk II," a bittersweet ode to not-getting-over-it that combines a chiming riff, classic-rock solo, and the year's most hilarious verse: "And do you remember the nights I called you up? / I was so fucked up / I didn't remember we were damaged up / I still love you, you dumb fuck."


It's already the band's most popular song, and one they've been playing live for years. It was originally written for Romantic, yet she knew it wouldn't be ready in time, so they kept workshopping it live.


"It was really this song in particular that made me feel like we had to re-record the album. We just didn't capture it in the way I had been dreaming about for so long. I had very high expectations that had to be met to get it there," she says.


Taking the time to get it right for Patience required, well, you could probably guess — and also faith that her wonderful ideas wouldn't find some other vessel. "For almost three years, I've Been terrified that some other heartbroken bitch also wrote 'Drunk II' and then I'd have nothing to show for that depressive episode except a bunch of sad memories," she says.


Yet for a musical group that doesn’t shy away from the idea of a radio-friendly hit, and, and also "Drunk II," potentially has several in their quiver, it does beg one question: Is their attention-getting name good for corporation? Dabice, who concedes that it's "pretty divisive," considers it piece of a long tradition of oppressed people appropriating the slurs used against them.


"You have people on the world wide web who mention we have the worst musical group name ever, and then other people who think it's the ideal. People who tell us they only listened us due to the musical group name and people who mention they are going to never listen to us because of it," Dabice says. "I do wish people wouldn't censor us or it made people feel 'awkward' to mention, yet isn't that also sort of the fun of rock and roll?"