What Do You Want Me to Say? It’s Never Going Away: Joyce Manor’s Never Hungover Again at 10

It’s summer and I’m back in my childhood home, spending a lot of time walking around the neighborhood I grew up in. So naturally, I’ve been listening to Never Hungover Again by Joyce Manor.

Few records capture this feeling of not-quite-nostalgia: the feeling of seeing outlines of the past with a vague awareness of what once colored them in without necessarily being compelled to miss whatever it was, but missing something; or the feeling of being unexpectedly pulled back into emotions and behaviors you thought you’d outgrown; the nervous, crushy ramblings of “Falling In Love Again”—“I think you’re funny / I like you friends / I like the way they treat you / I’ve got some money / that we could spend / not that you’re like that”—over an instrumental that feels like it’s teetering atop itself, crumbling at the outro with Barry Johnson singing word “falling” like he’s doing exactly that; the disappointment that you thought you’d matured past (or at least prepared yourself for) on “End of the Summer,” and its mirrored melancholy on the closer “Heated Swimming Pool”; even “Catalina Fight Song”—a track responsible for pop punk’s most joked-about mondegreen since “Hash Pipe”—with its barked verses masking deep-seated regret: “There’s no way to keep in touch with certain people / You wonder how long something can last / Pretty sure most people don’t think about that / But who the fuck’s laughing now?”

Never Hungover Again marked the beginning of Joyce Manor’s ongoing contract with Epitaph Records. It followed their self-professed sophomore slump, 2012’s Of All Things I Will Soon Grow Tired—an album that Barry Johnson has all but disowned. The runaway success of Joyce Manor’s self-titled debut allowed them to fuck around on its follow-up. When Joyce Manor leaked and the timelessly angsty and imminently singable closer “Constant Headache” made the rounds on Tumblr, cementing itself as a generation-defining anthem—one that would remain the group’s signature song a decade and a half into their existence—it felt like the true arrival of emo’s fourth wave that had been quietly brewing in basement venues across the East Coast and Midwest. And from a California band no less—a band that formed at Disneyland, studied the gospels of Blake Schwartzenbach and Rivers Cuomo, and would go on to make albums whose titles reference blink-182 and Sublime.

Attempting to distill Joyce Manor’s songs—bite-sized earworms composed of pretty straightforward time signatures and short, sticky lyrical passages—seems deceptively uncomplicated, but when you dissect it down to its disparate parts, some secret ingredient seems missing. It can’t possibly be that simple, even if Never Hungover Again is the album with the highest concentration of quintessential Joyce Manor songs.

“Heart Tattoo” is musically and lyrically repetitive, a naive teenage love song that’s cute and kind of dumb in a Blue Album way but also kind of brilliant in a Blue Album way. Weezer’s influence is all over Joyce Manor’s catalog, Never Hungover Again in particular—the crunchy guitars on “Falling in Love Again” and the insecure walking back of all of its romanticism on the following “End of the Summer,” whose titular line feels directly descended from Rivers Cuomo retorting “Maybe you could break my heart next summer!” To hear the goofy earnestness with which Barry Johnson delivers the lines “sounds better when you’re high on marijuana” and “feels weird, like a really weird movie” on “Schley” is to hear a Weezer fan nerding the fuck out.

Barry Johnson knows how to tap into the innate melodicism of a word or phrase and use it to its catchiest potential—the generic lead-in of a line like “looking at your face in the dark” immediately undercut by a slant-rhyming insult tossed like a grenade into a romantic moment (“you don’t even look that smart) on “Christmas Card,” or the sneaky power poppiness of the yelped “I wanna see what’s going on” hook of “The Jerk.” The name “Victoria” has a built-in musicality to it. In the chorus of its titular song, that name is delivered with isolated drums and gang vocals hollering out its stressed second syllable, letting the last two run away with the pounding percussion. The following “Schley” also uses the title-only chorus strategy, a chorus that never repeats. It doesn’t need to. No Joyce Manor album has ever exceeded 25 minutes. Each album—and each of its nine to 10 songs—is an exercise in restraint, in not overdoing it.

There’s a sincerity in Never Hungover Again’s silliness and its simplicity. A couplet like “It’s too sad / blue marker on a paper bag / you could wear it like a mask / you could be your own dad” is a funny non-sequitur until it hits you in a way that you don’t fully understand. The premise of “Heart Tattoo” is pretty basic, as is its reasoning—“I want a heart tattoo / I want it to hurt really bad / That’s how I’ll know / I’ll know it’s real”—and you can feel the song embracing its emotional reality while making fun of it (cinched by the Tom DeLonge-reminiscent backing vocals repeating “I know that it looks bad” at the outro).

The theme of physical evidence of an emotional experience is a recurring one throughout Never Hungover Again. The verses of “Victoria” describe sneaking back into the house after a night out and bearing the scrapes and scratches as proof of a small rebellion. (“Locked myself out and had to climb / Over the back wall and scraped my arm / It bled a little but it’s fine”). The juxtaposition of a fragmented violent scene and an expression of desire on “In The Army Now”’s hurried confession—“Furniture store / Shards of glass / I wanna kiss you through your hockey mask”—cuts deeper than you’d expect for just a passing remembrance of a version of someone you used to know.

At times, listening to Never Hungover Again feels like flipping through your old yearbook, the faint awareness of how lame it is to even pull it off the shelf in the first place lingering in the background, but not strongly enough to keep you from turning the pages and playing Guess Who with your formative years—wondering what so-and-so is up to, thinking of someone who hadn’t crossed your mind in forever, considering reaching out to an old friend or flame but not caring enough to actually do so. “I wish you would’ve died in high school / So you could be somebody’s idol,” Barry Johnson sings on “Heated Swimming Pool,” before immediately softening his purposefully tone-deaf backhanded compliment: “But you were clever / Always forever in command.”

Other times, Never Hungover Again feels like ending up in the kitchen during the back-half of a house party, talking to someone you don’t know very well and probably wouldn’t normally have a full conversation with. The distance is coincidental, as is momentarily being pulled into one another’s orbit. The two of you probably won’t have another at-length interaction again, but that’s okay. You’ll remember this one fondly.

Watch Joyce Manor’s Paste Session from 2021 below.

Grace Robins-Somerville is a writer from Brooklyn, New York, currently based in Wilmington, North Carolina. She is pursuing an MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing from University of North Carolina, Wilmington. Her work has appeared in The Alternative, Merry-Go-Round Magazine, Post-Trash, Swim Into The Sound and her “mostly about music” newsletter, Our Band Could Be Your Wife.