Mannequin Pussy: “Repression of your personal freedom is a cardinal sin of humanity – it means everything to us”

This view was mirrored in the experiences of others in Mannequin Pussy, especially Maxine Steen, the band’s guitarist and synth player, who often provides the light humour to counterbalance Missy’s blunt confidence.

“You know in the beginning of Austin Powers 2, where it turns out that Vanessa was a Fembot and he’s like, ‘Wait a minute, I’m single again! Yeah, baby!’” Maxine asks. “I think we all had this realisation about how having a relationship could be a distraction from dealing with your own business and your own life.”

It’s a natural mindset to possess when women are raised to believe that the endgame of their lives is to have a successful romantic relationship – and if they’re not in servitude to one, they are not only far from happy but they’re existentially unsafe. Missy can easily list the questions that arise, like, ‘What’s wrong with you?’ and, ‘Why are you such a failure of a woman?’

“Not to be pessimistic about what love is,” she says, “but I think oftentimes I’m expected to do all these things for someone who doesn’t do the same for me, [someone] who expects me to be wife, mother, teacher, cook, maid. All these different roles to satisfy someone else, and literally for what? So that men can advance more quickly in the workplace?”

All that time and energy spent helping someone else achieve their dreams could instead be used to grapple with how far you are from your own. And of course, K! offers, all of this is insidious and requires women to un-train themselves. “Un-train yourself before you wreck yourself,” Maxine says, and without missing a beat, Missy adds, both sternly and humorously, “And you will wreck yourself.”

It’s not lost on Missy that part of Mannequin Pussy’s USP goes beyond the fact that she's a rare female vocalist in hardcore and punk rock – she is also no longer in her 20s. The unfairness she discusses about romantic relationships, she says, is even reflected in rock music, where women in their 30s are almost non-existent because they don’t have safety nets or someone who has been consistently supporting and cheerleading them.

She frequently thinks about the idea that every guy in hardcore seems to have a dog because they have girlfriends at home willing to take care of them when they’re on tour. “I don’t have a fucking pet because there was never anyone who would take care of my pet when I was on tour – something as silly as that speaks to the roles that we as women are inspired to play for other people.”

With love shunned in favour of solitude, Missy, Maxine and the rest of the band – Colins “Bear” Regisford (bass) and Kaleen Reading (drums) – spent their time away from tour on their own, thinking, therapising, and, in Missy’s words (speaking only for herself), examining her own bad behaviour. As a result, the new Mannequin Pussy album, I Got Heaven, is very pissed off. And incredibly horny.

As well as losing the familiar comfort of The City Of Brotherly Love, this year is significant for Missy and the rest of Mannequin Pussy in other ways. I Got Heaven is a huge moment for them and it’s their first time on the cover of Kerrang! – a clean decade since the release of their first self-titled album.

If Missy (the only original and longest-standing member) has consciously thought about this 10-year cycle, it’s solely been to acknowledge that their success is right on time.

“With most professions or hobbies or artistic mediums, it takes about 10 years of practice and dedication and pouring yourself into something to build a reputation for yourself, and to see the fruits of your labours,” she offers.

From the outside – and to the band themselves – the turning point in their trajectory came when they created and released 2019’s Patience, which notably led to their songs being used in the award-winning HBO crime drama Mare Of Easttown. But reaching such a coveted milestone wasn’t a straight-forward process.

Despite all four members of Mannequin Pussy feeling that the music written for Patience surpassed anything they'd done before, both lyrically and sonically, after they recorded the album, there wasn’t that usual feeling of catharsis or excitement. “The simplest explanation is that I was listening to the mixes of the record and I didn’t feel anything,” shrugs Missy.

They reasoned that when you listen to your own mixes and aren’t emotionally moved, how could you expect anyone else to be? Bear, who has been quiet for most of our time together, remembers, “We were ready to elevate ourselves as artists and it’s important that the tools you’re working with are as elevated as you are for where you’re at. It felt like we just made Romantic Part Two, and that’s not the point.”

As a unit they decided that they’d just have to re-record everything – which was a key lesson for all of them. “We learned our intuition is probably correct and especially when our intuition is all aligned. If we were a few years younger in our careers, we would’ve ignored that feeling but we just listen to ourselves and that’s how we progress now,” explains Missy.

Enter new label Epitaph, who paid for Mannequin Pussy to re-record the entire album.

“They’re more of a patron of the arts than a boss,” says Missy. “We know a lot of people who really don’t fuck with their label and really don’t fuck with the people who own the masters to their music, and do not fuck with the very people they have to work with to make it. We are lucky.”

As a clear champion of the band and their potential, Epitaph encouraged them to work differently for I Got Heaven. Instead of Missy working on most of the music in hermit-mode in Philadelphia, they all flew to Los Angeles for pre-production to work together and with producer John Congleton.

The resulting record is an electric mix of hardcore, emo, punk and shoegaze, dramatically chopping, changing, shifting from hard to soft and never settling. On its incendiary opening self-titled track about female autonomy and the hatred of organised religion in America, Missy yells at the furthest edge of her voice, ‘And what if I’m an angel? Oh, what if I’m a bore? And what if I was confident would you just hate me more?’ Elsewhere, on the dark hardcore of Of Her, she comes to terms with the sacrifices that her parents, particularly her mother, made to allow her to ‘make it’.

If you ask Missy to describe I Got Heaven, she calls it a “lustful-feeling, really horny record about desire”. But as much as the record is about that burning passion and owning your own sexuality, it’s an album of the imagination in many ways – much less rooted in reality than previous outings.

“I think desire is something that leads you down very traditional paths – to closeness, partnership, relationships,” she says. “Stepping away from all of that for an extended amount of time really birthed a lot of those themes, feelings, and the fantasy that can come with time alone.”

Every member of Mannequin Pussy was experiencing similar changes in their lives, be it separation or experimenting with modes of self-healing; all of it in stark contrast to the paths they’d been on for so long. But in that apparent emptiness, there was space for something to be born that went beyond internal work: the external, creative power of those gains.

The release of their album is timely, beyond the ways in which their U.S. fanbase will understand it. In the UK, as the two major political parties signpost their future campaigns, trans rights – or the lack of – appear to be a leading policy point of their drives. As a trans member of the band, Maxine certainly feels the palpable political tension around her identity when she is over in the UK.

“It’s a weird obsession and typical fascist playbook scapegoating, and politicians use fear to get what they want: personal gains for them,” she says.

Again and again the album blows its clarion call for freedom, most notably on the penultimate track, Aching, on which they call out, ‘I got to / I got to / I got to / I got to be free.’ Even on the album artwork, a nude figure embraces (or restrains) a pig: the person feels free and it’s uncertain whether or not the animal is. “I think repression of your personal freedom is a cardinal sin of humanity,” says Maxine, now serious. “It means everything to us.”

It’s easier to feel free in your 20s, buoyed by hope. Missy believes that wide-eyed wonder is lost in your 30s because you develop pattern recognition and are suddenly aware of the difference between coincidences and tactics. Depressingly, in both the personal and political, much of what plagues us is a tactic of some kind – our own, other people’s, governments and institutions.

“We as a people have progressed faster than the very governments we live under, where we’ve developed the pattern recognition for the way they act, but we’re not powerful enough to change their ways because they’ve got all the power,” says Missy.

Reflecting on her 20s, she remembers how optimistic she was, studying political science in college and believing that by the time she turned 35, a seismic shift would have occurred in government. People like Missy and her bandmates – left-wing, open-minded millennials – would come of age to climb career ladders and deconstruct harmful structures. And yet, in an election year where it's all-but nailed-on to be Biden vs. Trump, she says neither option is anything short of depressing and more of the same and worse.

“I don’t know how Joe Biden convinced anyone in America that he was anything but an evil little dipshit, because looking at his history you’ll see what a little fucking gremlin he is and I don’t mean in a complimentary way,” Missy says bluntly. “I love a little gremlin.”

Maxine shakes her head. “He ain’t a cute gremlin.”

“I need to think of something worse for him,” Missy ponders. “He’s a fucking ghoul and he always has been.”

Although they currently stand with their eyes fixed on a depressing horizon, Mannequin Pussy have never felt so in their own power. And music is to thank for that.

“This is by no means an easy world in which to navigate, so it’s a privilege to be working for ourselves and for each other because of our talents – that is a monumental feeling,” smiles Missy at the end of our conversation.

“I feel so privileged to have found these people and these creative collaborations in my life that make me feel free.”

I Got Heaven is released March 1 via Epitaph – pre-order or pre-save now.

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