Joyce Manor’s SoCal Classic ‘Never Hungover Again’ Turns 10

To celebrate the 10th anniversary of Joyce Manor’s breakthrough third album, Never Hungover Again, Barry Johnson has commissioned the first “deluxe reissue interview.” Back in 2014, we met for a Grantland profile at Gable House Bowl, a dingy and beloved Torrance, California, landmark where Johnson met guitarist Chase Knobbe and bassist Matt Ebert (Johnson and Ebert solidified their friendship after reconnecting on an Orange County ska message board). However, an exact restaging of the SoCal pop-punk institution’s “first legitimate press” would prove impossible, as Gable was slated for demolition in 2022, to be replaced by 200 luxury apartments. This time, we’re rolling at Bowlero, a private-equity monster that will likely bring forth the death of local leagues (though it tries to add O.C. flavor with a painted mural of Mike Ness’s guitar).

As we sit down to discuss this obscenely on-the-nose metaphor for American decline and the legacy of Never Hungover Again, Johnson orders a round of Heineken 0.0, which initially hits like the punch line of a joke he’s been waiting to tell for a decade. His forbearance is not a sign of wisdom accrued from the maturity that comes with marriage and the mid-30s, but the opposite—they recently ended a jaunt through the Southeast very hungover, again and again. “I went really hard, and it was really fun, but I used that [part of my life] up,” he admits. “I can’t take this much longer.”

Such is the trade-off when an emo-pop-punk hybrid titled Never Hungover Again turns a side hustle into an actual career in genres fueled by arrested development—while it’s an evolutionary successor to Descendents and Blink-182 that relocates pop punk from skate parks and locker rooms to dead-end adult relationships and itinerant coffee-shop gigs, it’s still an album called Never Hungover Again. You know, the sort of promise people make to themselves when they’re a little too young to be too old for this shit.

On the other hand, few albums over the past 10 years have been so subtle about their seismic impact. At 10 songs and 19 minutes, Never Hungover Again is either the biggest little album of its era or vice versa. Similarly, Joyce Manor’s success can be both inconceivable and humbling all at once. They played several dates at the 4,000-cap Hollywood Palladium in 2021. Then, in 2022, Joyce Manor became an arena rock band. Not because their sixth studio album, 40 oz. to Fresno, amplified their sound to unrecognizable expanse and grandeur; the most recent Joyce Manor album was two minutes shorter than Never Hungover Again. Rather, they headlined the Long Beach Arena with longtime running buddies Jeff Rosenstock and PUP as support. But in 2024, they’ve done underplays throughout the Southeast and will be opening for the Gaslight Anthem.

Signature song “Constant Headache” broke through The Bear’s Chicagoland (and R.E.M.) firewall, only to be drowned out when the Faks prattled on about haunting. Months earlier, Miller’s Girl, an erotic thriller starring Jenna Ortega, featured a character named “Joyce Manor,” and the film has a 29 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes. They were a musical guest on John Mulaney’s talk show series on Netflix, Everybody’s in L.A., putting them on a similar level to St. Vincent, Weezer, and Beck. Mulaney specifically requested “Catalina Fight Song.” “Every part of me was terrified,” Johnson remembers of the band’s first television performance, which was broadcast live, unlike more typical late-night shows. They took a photo with Richard Kind at the wrap party, who was stoked to meet them because “his kid is really into Mitski.”

An illustrative moment of major-minor pop-punk fame came in March, when Joyce Manor played a particularly demoralizing gig at Collective Con—described on its website as “Northeast Florida’s Largest Anime, Comic Book, Sci-Fi/Fantasy, Cosplay, & Pop Culture Event!” The organizers decided to throw an Emo Night into this gumbo of nerd culture, and Johnson figured the thought process went as such: “Let’s get an emo band. What’s an emo band we can afford? Joyce Manor.”

After interviewing Joyce Manor at numerous points during the past 10 years, I’ve gotten the impression that Johnson appreciates anything that might snuff out any flicker of potential for his band to blow up. “I didn’t go to college or anything,” Johnson recalls, though pragmatic concerns tempered his ambitions. “I wanted to go on tour, and when I turned 30, I was gonna work at Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s because they pay pretty good and then die of old age.” Ebert concurs: “We were committing to pop punk at 24.” Their self-titled 2011 debut was a word-of-mouth hit, one of the first albums to become synonymous with Tumblr and a central node for the bubbling subcultures of “Defend Pop Punk,” “the new wave of post-hardcore,” and “Emo Revival.” By 2013, they measured their success by advancing from “a couch” to “a room.” When Ebert took the ultimate leap from “a room” to “an apartment,” he rediscovered his 2012 tax return while sorting through old boxes: “I made like $8,000 [that year].”

The members of Joyce Manor were free agents heading into the writing of Never Hungover Again. The band did initial sessions in Philadelphia with Joe Reinhart, whom they’d gotten to know while touring with his previous band, the massively influential emo revivalists Algernon Cadwallader. After their first show together at a “small garage/half-pipe,” Reinhart says he “instantly felt a switch flip inside [him] that hadn’t been touched since first discovering punk rock as a preteen, a rare and genuine what the fuck moment.” Reinhart would go on to greater acclaim in Hop Along, whose inimitable vocalist, Frances Quinlan, graces the album cover with Ebert. Reinhart also remembers the sessions as a time of joyful penury: “The band crashed on couches and ate Trader Joe’s dumpster food while we worked. It was an exciting time to be DIY kids.”

Joyce Manor’s first two albums were respectively released on 6131 and Asian Man Records—both beloved and influential California punk imprints but not money-printing machines. There was only one label that made sense for the next step. Epitaph Records founder Brett Gurewitz had already been kicking himself for missing the boat on Joyce Manor, a band he loved due to how little Johnson’s songwriting resembled his own galaxy-brain wordiness in Bad Religion. “[It’s] simple in the way that a haiku is simple, and he states these truths in a really beautiful and interesting way,” Gurewitz explains. “Sometimes with humor, sometimes with sadness, but always with as few words as possible.”

But in 2014, Epitaph Records was in a bidding war with its own reputation. The Los Angeles–based indie was putting up major-label numbers with the Offspring and Rancid throughout the ’90s and had maintained a good deal of credibility with legacy acts like Converge and Thursday. But the successes that kept Epitaph thriving throughout the era of Myspace and Hot Topic emo had put Gurewitz on the defensive when he first met Joyce Manor—“You know, you guys have Matchbook Romance,” he jokes. “At that moment, Epitaph needed Joyce Manor as much or more than Joyce Manor needed Epitaph.” Indeed, Never Hungover Again immediately revitalized Epitaph, starting a run of scene-defining records from Pianos Become the Teeth, Touché Amoré, the World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die, and the Sidekicks (meanwhile, Title Fight inked to Epitaph’s sister label Anti-), continuing to this day with critical favorites like the Linda Lindas, Mannequin Pussy, and Soul Glo.

In return, Gurewitz served as a sounding board and quasi-executive producer for the band’s third album, talking Joyce Manor out of the original sequencing and its original title of In the Army Now. In 1995, Rancid turned down just about every major in existence and stuck with Epitaph to release … And Out Come the Wolves, the gold standard to which Gurewitz has held just about everything else released on the label. But nearly 30 years later, according to Gurewitz, “when a beloved band gets signed to Epitaph, the cool kids say that they sold out,” so he wasn’t particularly stoked on how In the Army Now would be interpreted. He was right on both counts—even the band admits the original track list was “terrible,” and besides, “In the Army Now” has been the least-played song from Never Hungover Again since its release.

More than a label guy, Johnson readily admits he needed someone to jar him out of his tendencies toward self-deprecation. Of All Things I Will Soon Grow Tired in 2012 was Johnson’s attempt to preempt the backlash he envisioned for Joyce Manor. It was a spiky and serrated sophomore album that jumbled ska, Smiths fanfic, and a Buggles cover into a little over 13 minutes. “Songs like ‘Constant Headache’ are so transcendent, and to have written that on your first record must have felt weird to a kid from Torrance,” Gurewitz muses. “I can see Barry pushing back against the universe to test it to see, like, ‘Am I really legit?’”

This self-doubt infused the process of writing Never Hungover Again from beginning to end. The brevity of Joyce Manor songs inspired countless comparisons to Guided by Voices, but Robert Pollard forgets more songs in two weeks than Joyce Manor writes in two years. A deluxe reissue of Never Hungover Again probably wouldn’t crack a half hour; the only B side from the sessions was already repurposed as the closer on 40 oz. to Fresno. The band’s initial writing process resulted in a handful of songs that Johnson immediately discounted. “The lyrics were pretty good; the hooks weren’t there,” Johnson recalls. “They were just not very fun to listen to.” According to Knobbe, about 20 seconds of usable music came from their efforts. The album’s most straightforward song—“Heart Tattoo”—ended up being the turning point, the most obvious Blink homage the band has ever made, with Ebert doing a dead-on Tom DeLonge impression with his backup vocals. (Mark Hoppus later gave his nod of approval.)

With their Epitaph deal providing a necessary financial lifeline, Joyce Manor and Reinhart reconvened in Los Angeles for the proper recording of Never Hungover Again. The mood was positive, the performances were solid, and no one was cracking under the pressure of their first (relatively) big-budget production … at least until everyone heard the initial mixes. “Barry started freaking out, like, ‘Oh, the record is ruined,’” Gurewitz remembers. Drawing on his decades of wrangling classic records out of self-destructive punks, he assured the band that a proper mixer could make the rest of the world hear what they did in the studio. Enter Tony Hoffer, who made a name for himself at the turn of the century working with Air and Beck and at the time was fresh off of M83’s Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming. “He was a guy who’d done pop records, but really cool indie, Pitchfork kind of records,” Gurewitz explains. “So I thought, OK, that’s the perfect matrix for Joyce Manor.”

One could hear “Heart Tattoo” and rightfully place Joyce Manor into a lineage of sweet, smart-ass SoCal punk. Or, the wistful and wordy “Schley” might evoke the lighter moments of Jawbreaker. But hints of Johnson’s New Wave and Britpop fixations were just as apparent on “Falling in Love Again” and “Heated Swimming Pool,” the latter of which was the very type of song that Gurewitz envisioned when matching Joyce Manor with a guy who produced Belle and Sebastian. “Barry basically told me he prefers the sound of synthesizers over guitars,” Hoffer recalls, noting that the frontman had name-checked Gary Numan, “Nothing Compares 2 U,” and “Friday I’m in Love” as primary influences.

Never Hungover Again wasn’t an instant sensation—reviews were largely positive, not effusive. They had gotten their much-coveted Pitchfork review, and Gurewitz is quick to remind me how poorly its modest 7.8 has aged in the subsequent decade (in fact, it became the basis for a running joke about the site’s practice of lowballing emo as editorial policy). Sales were brisk, not spectacular. Even I can remember that Never Hungover Again took its time to really sink its hooks into me before I would find myself playing it three times in a row during grueling, hour-long commutes on the 405 during the summer of 2014. “I feel like our growth has always been so slow and consistent,” Ebert notes. “There was never a time where I [thought], ‘This could make or break us.’”

Joyce Manor went on to make albums that many of their new supporters assumed would make or break them—2016’s Cody was a shinier, “more mature” affair produced by alt-rock mainstay Rob Schnapf that received a more muted reception from a larger audience. Pitchfork awarded Cody a 7.7 yet claimed it “sounds like Everclear” in its 2016 “Year in Disappointment” list (“Last You Heard of Me” does sound a little like “Santa Monica” and is also one of Johnson’s unquestionable peaks as a songwriter). They received a startlingly out-of-character 2.5-star pan from the otherwise service-oriented All Music Guide, and while Cody did get a shout-out from Time magazine, it was in the issue that declared Donald Trump 2016’s Person of the Year. Two years later, Johnson had considered taking a break for a solo record and instead hunkered down to create Million Dollars to Kill Me, where the grind of the past decade finally caught up; “Big Lie” seems to be the one Million Dollars song that makes it to their set lists these days.

And then, Joyce Manor did the best possible thing for their continued existence: absolutely nothing. Whereas Cody and Million Dollars initially suffered from comparisons to Never Hungover Again, end-of-the-decade lists solidified the latter’s reputation as a landmark achievement. Much to the delight of Johnson, Never Hungover Again clocked in at no. 90 on Pitchfork’s 2010s list, immediately above Ariana Grande, Bad Bunny, Bon Iver, and Watch the Throne. Rolling Stone included it in the best pop-punk albums of all time. More importantly, Ebert speculates that “rock music wasn’t that fashionable in 2019” before it “got everyone playing guitar again.” That includes a wave of bands influenced by Mitski and Phoebe Bridgers, paradigm-shifting indie artists who were effusive Joyce Manor fans in their earliest days; in fact, the latter contributed a then-unheralded guest vocal to Cody’s “Do You Really Want to Not Get Better?” “Midwest emo” became an obsession with digital natives on TikTok and somehow included Joyce Manor, a band from Torrance with literally no twinkly guitars or spoken-word intros.

Even Joyce Manor’s lesser-loved albums proved prescient as power pop became a thriving subgenre again, best exemplified by recent tour mates Liquid Mike. And perhaps because it’s one minute full of quotables, “Catalina Fight Song” always finds a way to go viral on whatever social media platform dominates at the time—“It took nine years to catch on,” Ebert explains.

While the notoriously (and intentionally) misheard opening lyric tends to get the most play, everything that comes after explains how “Catalina Fight Song” has emerged as Joyce Manor’s defining moment. A sample of choice lines: “You could teach the seventh grade / Do you think because you chose to?,” “Car smells like hot Gatorade,” “Fear of what you weren’t exposed to,” “Wonder how long something can last / Pretty sure most people don’t think about that,” and “Never really had a drug phase / So you think you’re fucking miserable now?” If not aspirational, it’s at least familiar, comforting, or even validating for people who’ve been the oldhead at the pop-punk gig or the youngest person at the dead-end job, thinking to themselves, “So, this was growing up?” Never Hungover Again endures not because it sounds like 2014, but because it sounds like being 20-something. “Our [audience has] been 18-24 for 10 years now,” Ebert explains. “The older [fans] are in the back now.”

Ian Cohen is a writer and registered dietitian living in San Diego. His work has appeared in Pitchfork, Spin, Stereogum, and Grantland.