I Got Heaven | Album Review

Mannequin Pussy are at the perfect point in their music. On their senior record I Got Heaven, they marry the iconic furiosity of past materials to romantic epiphany in a mangling, twisting, messy feast of bleeding-heart rock. While navigating multiple forced hiatuses, Covid-19 recording limbo, losing rights to their masters, and the theft of a U-Haul housing all their set equipment on tour, Mannequin Pussy have landed with their feet planted firmly in the fields of modern indie punk.

Compressing an angstful spirit into a penetrable shoegaze-tinged homage to aging emotions, their newest record plays out on a more personal note than past releases, yet still preserves the unwonted fundamentals of their charged music. I Got Heaven works as a scrapbook for all the challenging emotions swirling in and out of love and by sifting the most poignant thoughts through an overdrive sieve, we enjoy the designs of the heart with Mannequin Pussy’s loving touch.

All this tromping around in oversized boots may seem wearisome; slow progress being made towards understanding in pooling, muddy memories, grasping at bits and pieces of catharsis and thrashing through shared pain. Yet, what the quartet offers instead is much simpler: succor from isolation, healing through hearing. Their raw emotionality, born over a decade ago in the byways of Philadelphia punk rock, has kept a relevance coursing through veins of their albums, that, innervated by the current emotional state of the nation repeatedly challenges the conventions of musical culture. I Got Heaven is the best sort of release from tenure acts like Mannequin Pussy, the sort that stands on the shoulders of hardcore opus’s like Romantic, Patience and Perfect and bellows this unguarded confrontation with itself that sounds best turned way up.