Sometimes it’s easy to forget that Joyce Manor have been around for more than a decade and a half at this point. They’ve become veterans of California’s storied punk scene, and yet, they sound forever young in their constant headache energy without sounding immature about it like a few other pop-punk bands out there who’ve got decades on them.

Perhaps it’s because they’ve been playing the long game about it all from the very start. Lyrically, frontman Barry Johnson’s lyrics has always kept it topically relatable. Musings on old friends, new and former lovers, growing old, growing tired, being depressed, and getting high as far back as when the band was just cracking into their 20s make up the storylines. In short, they’ve never hid feeling washed from the get-go despite always having the potential to sound like a train running off the tracks.

I Used To Go To This Bar is different, though. This time around, he and the Torrance trio are beginning to acknowledge their hindsight years through weird dreams, blunt rotations, and brushes with death through another very good album of succinctly smart punk punches with a few new tricks up their sleeved tattoos that don’t overstay their welcome — 9 tightly-wound tracks in a packed 20 minutes — as has become their calling card.

For every violence-in-a-weed-shop barreling or Sunny D pop-rock anthem (“I Know Where Mark Chen Lives”, “Well, Whatever It Was”) there’s Rentals-esque or cowpunk’d indie-pop comedowns (“Falling Into It”, “All My Friends Are So Depressed”) and squeaky clean dance-punk (“After All You Put Me Through”) on the other side of it. The very necessary “classic” style Joyce Manor jams are in there, too, (“I Used To Go To This Bar”, “Grey Guitar”) without sounding redundant from what they’ve already written in the past, accentuated by morbidity.

Providing the exclamation point in what amounts to a mile marker in their casual evolution, Bad Religion guitarist and founder of Joyce Manor’s longtime label home, Epitaph Records, Brett Gurewitz, was behind the boards of the listen. His SoCal punk scene godfather hands double as a formal blessing which reinforces their growing vitality by not fucking around with a winning loser formula. Backed up with rock-solid production, he keeps the trio’s sound loud where it counts and leaves room for just the right amount of fuss in moments where the band opts for some wistful softness.

If there’s one takeaway from their latest bout with life this time around, it’s that maybe Joyce Manor can’t quite escape the hands of time in the physical sense. Still, there’s no signs of aging to their brand of pop-punk. If anything, they keep finding little ways to get better at it as time passes by.

Highlights: “I Know Where Mark Chen Lives”, “Well, Whatever It Was”, “Grey Guitar”

Joyce Manor’s I Used To Go To This Bar is available now on Epitaph Records.

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