Joyce Manor's Barry Johnson on creating their new album

22 July 2014 | 11:21 am | Kane Sutton

"We’re pushing ourselves and trying things we haven’t done before. There’d be no point in doing it otherwise"

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In 2011, Joyce Manor released a self-titled debut and made an immediate impact within punk and emo circles with final track, Constant Headache, becoming a heaving, drunken shout-along live. Second record, 2012’s Of All Things I Will Soon Grow Tired, also became a lauded favourite. Fast-forward to six months ago and singer Barry Johnson and the band found themselves scratching their heads trying to figure out how they could illustrate their musical growth.

“We wrote a handful of songs just after the second record came out. They were alright, but it didn’t seem like we’d grown a bunch; they just sounded like the same stuff we’d been making. Every time we had a break from tours we’d get together and try to collaborate on stuff, but we went through about a year where nothing we were making was blowing us away. There was no ‘Oh my god, I can’t wait to record this or show it to people.’ Then what happened was I’d written a skeleton of this song and I thought it was pretty good, and our guitar player Chase was like, ‘I wrote a riff,’ which was strange because he doesn’t usually write riffs independently. So we decided to put them both together and it ended up being a pretty big moment; it was the boost we needed to realise that the next record had to sound as good as this song. That’s when I felt like our sound matured a bit. It was eerie just how well the parts came together.”

Known for their cryptic lyrics, yelled and shouted, often at a fast pace, Joyce Manor’s new record Never Hungover Again sees Johnson attempt a different method, writing verses that adopt this idea of maturing artistically. “One thing I feel like I have achieved lyrically that I haven’t managed to do before is on Heart Tattoo; it’s only about one thing. It’s only about getting a heart tattoo, and I’ve never done that before. I tend to like stuff that’s more cryptic, or it’ll be straightforward and then I’ll replace words to make it sound more surreal or vague. So yeah, with Heart Tattoo, it was focused on one thing and it was more direct, and that’s a pretty new thing for me. We’re pushing ourselves and trying things we haven’t done before. There’d be no point in doing it otherwise.”

The band is set to tour the US and Europe in support of their latest record, but they’re just as excited to get back home. “I was just getting over strep throat that last show we played in Perth. It was so funny; the few shows before that over on the east coast, I couldn’t sing, our guitar player had to sing for me. That was our first show where I could actually sing. We absolutely love it over there. The best show we’ve ever played was in Melbourne, so we have to get over there again. We can’t wait to get the show on the road.”

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