When it comes to recognizing forms of musical greatness, there are titles so broad and grandiose that it seems impossible to bestow them on any single entity. (“The biggest band in the world,” “the king of rock ‘n’ roll,” etc.) At the opposite extreme, there are distinctions so specific they hardly seem notable. I am about to discuss an example of the latter, while also making a case for this particular distinction being especially notable.
It concerns the southern California punk band Joyce Manor and how they have made two of the greatest 19-minute albums of all time.
First, some pertinent context: Joyce Manor makes short albums. Hardcore fans will mention this within the first minute of explaining their interest in the band, and casual followers will bring it up in the first three seconds. It is the most well-known fact about them. In 2016, they put out an album called Cody that was precisely 24 minutes and 30 seconds, and that is their longest record to date. It’s like Joyce Manor’s Sandinista!, and it’s shorter than a typical episode of The Daily podcast.
Joyce Manor’s commitment to putting out LPs that are typically classified as EPs by most “normal” bands represents a strange form of duration-derived integrity. The band’s singer-songwriter Barry Johnson is an avowed fan of Guided By Voices and The Smiths, and his songs represent a surprisingly clean marriage of those bands rendered in the style of punchy melodic punk. Joyce Manor songs typically boast clear and distinctive guitar riffs reminiscent of the parts Johnny Marr created as backdrops for Morrissey’s miserablist witticisms. And they emulate the brutally succinct structures preferred by Robert Pollard.
This approach has unquestionably limited Joyce Manor’s commercial prospects. Despite a robust online fan base and their genuine generational importance as a musical touchstone of the so-called “Tumblr” era from the early 2010s, Joyce Manor doesn’t even have a million monthly listeners on Spotify. At the same time, however, Johnson’s ability to transpose rock classicist songwriting on to a style of music historically geared toward middle and high school-aged listeners has attracted an audience of listeners who were entering their 30s back when Tumblr was still a thing. (Thinking specifically of John Mulaney — who referred to Joyce Manor as “one of my favorite bands” while introducing on his own show — and me.)
The most celebrated Joyce Manor record is 2014’s Never Hungover Again, one of this century’s definitive pop-punk statements, a near-perfect amalgam of crunchy guitar-pop and economic lyrical storytelling. It also clocks in — according to the digital display on the CD boombox in my office — at exactly 19:06. This was an improvement on their classic debut, 2011’s self-titled Joyce Manor, which was nearly 19 minutes long. (Eighteen minutes and 42 seconds, to be precise.) The follow-up release, 2012’s Of All Things I Will Soon Grow Tired, fell short of that mark artistically (it has no song as beloved as the self-titled’s “Constant Headache”) and in terms of the clock (it’s five minutes and 38 seconds shorter, which is probably too short).
For Joyce Manor fans of the more “advanced” vintage, Joyce Manor albums recall the brevity of another SoCal act, the Beach Boys. Particularly the pre-Pet Sounds period where the late, great Brian Wilson composed a series of songs that (like Barry Johnson with Joyce Manor) obsess over the distant triumphs and still-painful heartaches of adolescence, over music that is insistently catchy and frequently upbeat. Something about growing up as a rock ‘n’ roll devotee near Los Angeles makes a person a nostalgist before their time. (A Never Hungover Again track like the self-explanatory “End Of The Summer” make this connection obvious.)
The Beach Boys also routinely put out short records, often in the high 20-minute range. Though you could easily argue they should have been even shorter — their finest pre-Pet Sounds record, 1965’s The Beach Boys Today!, would be Cody-sized if you cut the solid-but-inessential cover “Do You Wanna Dance?” and the borderline-insulting filler track “Bull Session With ‘Big Daddy.'” To their credit, Joyce Manor never bother with filler. Their albums arrive pre-edited to the bone, with only the killer parts left intact.
I bring this up because Joyce Manor just put out a new record. It’s called I Used To Go To This Bar, and it’s one of my favorite things they’ve ever done, possibly since Never Hungover Again. Though explaining why is a challenge. This band’s sonic signatures — those grabby riffs, Johnson’s functional punk-dude howl, the “young man’s melancholy” emotional tenor — have remained intact for the past 15 years. The upside of being known for brevity is that it can conceal a rather narrow and limited musical attack. If Joyce Manor were more long-winded, they would have worn out their welcome long ago. (As most bands of this ilk inevitably do.)
But on I Used To Go To This Bar, Joyce Manor retains their intuitive feel for two important (and increasingly rare) skills in songwriting — they know how to get your attention, and they know when to leave. Take “I Know Where Mark Chen Lives,” which opens the record and immediately establishes its underlying theme (i.e. songs that reflect on the messed-up misadventures of formerly living as an addict) in the guise of an instantly anthemic punk-rock fight song (which might, paradoxically, make some listeners want to pound beers). Johnson tells his story using a bare minimum of nouns and verbs: “Name and home address, a pair of bony legs / Is it real? Can it feel when you bash its head? / When someone talks a lot inside the cannabis shop / ‘Hey, give me all the money, babe, and no one gets shot!'” By the time you’ve clocked it as a song about robbing a dispensary, Joyce Manor has already moved on to track two.
Glimpses of wild tales recur throughout I Used To Go To This Bar, interspersed with tiny snapshots of suburban banality. My favorite is from the album’s most blatant Morrissey rip, “All My Friends Are So Depressed,” when Johnson sings, “Key lime pie and Frampton live / wish that I would fucking die.” Moz himself would fucking die if he could come up with something that good in 2026.
When I listen to I Used To Go To This Bar, as I have many times in the past few days, I never think, “There should be more of this.” On the contrary, I find that it’s exactly the right amount. Even though we as listeners have been conditioned lately to equate “more” with “better.” In 2025, Jack White raised some hackles when he questioned this tendency in live music, with the fetishes for three-hour shows and multiple encores, arguing that “I’ve seen a plethora of rock and roll gigs that lasted 45 minutes and blew my mind and inspired me beyond belief.” But the “bloat is best” mentality is worse with recorded music. Some of the best-selling albums of recent years, including Morgan Wallen’s I’m The Problem (almost 117 minutes) and Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department (more than 65 minutes), drone on endlessly while exploiting the “longer tracklists mean more dollars” incentives of time-sucking streaming platforms.
Personally, I can’t imagine choosing to put on I’m The Problem when I could just listen to I Used To Go To This Bar six times in a row. Which reminds me: The new Joyce Manor album is their first 19-minute release since Never Hungover Again. It is, in fact, almost exactly the same length, coming in at 19 minutes and 10 seconds. In this context, I suppose, those spare four seconds could be considered wasteful. But I’ve decided to forgive it this time.
I Used To Go To This Bar is out now via Epitaph. Find more information here.
