Recommended Album: Mannequin Pussy – ‘I Got Heaven’

Mannequin Pussy have been flirting with making the leap to big alternative rock ambitions status since their 2019 breakthrough, Patience, heard the Philly punk band softening their hardcore-ners for glowing alternative rock hooks made all the more tantalizing by Marisa Dabici’s dark, broken halo circling around them. With their fourth full-length, I Got Heaven, Mannequin Pussy get to that place, but once again, by their rules only. If you’ve heard any of the advance singles from the album — a perfect run of anti-dogmatic rage, vulnerable, self-reflective slow-burns that pair well next to worn LP copy of former tourmate and local peer Japanese Breakfast’s Jubilee, whirring fire and desire that should translate easily over onto bigger stages, and hypnotic grooves that bleed into the scene’s current fascination with trip-hop and blush mid-’90s-era alternative-pop, then you’ll already have been satiated by the album’s peaks. Consider these as red herrings just as well, though, as the album’s back half feeds off Mannequin Pussy’s innate fury in some of their most blistered up displays of hardcore-punk fireworks where emotions get the best of Dabici righteously, with drummer Kaleen Reading, bassist Colins “Bear” Regisford, and guitarist Maxine Steen ready to meet her at any moment. Credit for I Got Heaven‘s glossier coating over their sound, began gluing its parts together over the course of Patience as well 2021’s Perfect EP, must be paid to the consistent hand of major player indie producer John Congleton who adds a luster to the band’s spark. With that spark, Mannequin Pussy raise Hell in Heaven, making the album fully ascendant.

Highlights: “I Got Heaven”, “Loud Bark”, “Nothing Like”

Mannequin Pussy’s I Got Heaven is available now on Epitaph Records.

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