I t’s a little more than three hours before Mannequin Pussy take the stage at Brooklyn Steel in front of a near-capacity crowd. A long line of fans is already stretching down the block, waiting for the doors to open. But the four members of the punk band are unable to focus on much right now besides their desperate desire to get some rest.
They’ve spent the past month crammed together in a Ford Transit van, putting roughly 5,200 miles on the dashboard and playing practically every night. They slump down on a dressing-room couch, surrounded by piles of luggage, coffee mugs, a carton of Marlboro cigarettes, and a sad little Hormel platter of pepperoni and hard salami. They’re here to talk about their new LP, I Got Heaven (out March 1), which incorporates synths into their sound while sticking firmly to their punk roots, but bassist Colins “Bear” Regisford, 37, isn’t saying much, since he appears to be at least half asleep.
“The routing on this tour is not meant to be kind to the human body,” says Marisa Dabice, 36, the group’s co-founder and lead singer. “We’re pushing ourselves to the absolute limit of what we’re capable of.”
Once their set begins and the adrenaline starts pumping, everything changes. Regisford’s entire body pulsates with energy, and Dabice stalks the stage like a feral fusion of Patti Smith and Iggy Pop, belting out painfully personal songs like “Perfect” (“Kiss all my holes/Call me a bitch”). Performances like this are a big part of what has earned the group a fiercely loyal cult following throughout the U.S. over the past few years, and huge buzz in the music press.
It’s a level of success that would have all but guaranteed big money flowing their way if Mannequin Pussy were a rock band in the Nineties. But things are different in 2023. Dabice drives around her adopted hometown of Philadelphia in a 2001 Saturn that looks like it’s held together with duct tape. Until very recently, drummer Kaleen Reading, 31, was earning $15 an hour by working as a public-safety officer at a boarding school; she now makes ends meet by giving drum lessons and teaching at the School of Rock. Regisford and guitarist-synth player Maxine Steen, 33, both work for moving companies, lugging furniture all over Philly whenever the band is off the road.
For Steen, who is trans and attempting to raise money for gender-affirming surgery via GoFundMe, the work is grueling, and sometimes humiliating. “I am a blue-collar bitch,” she says. “And for a trans person, working as a mover is a pretty tough job. I catch a lot of shit just walking down the street. Trans people are constantly ridiculed or laughed at or stared at. It happens every day. But it really sucks when you’re carrying someone’s dresser or couch up a flight of stairs.” As hard as that can be, though, she’s all-in on the band. “I didn’t get into music to make money,” she adds. “I got into music because I wanted to rip it. It keeps me alive.”
DABICE RELATES TO THIS all too well. As a middle-class kid growing up in the wealthy enclave of Westport, Connecticut, she always felt like an outsider. “I got made fun of every day for how I dressed,” she tells me when we meet at a vegan cafe and coffee bar in the Queen Village neighborhood of Philadelphia about two weeks before the tour kickoff. “From a very young age, you’re told you’re a loser.” Everything changed at 13, when she saw Massachusetts-based hardcore group Piebald open up for Jimmy Eat World. It was her first glimpse at a world that existed outside MTV or terrestrial radio. “I was like, ‘Oh, my God,’” she says. “It felt like a safe place to be yourself and dress how you want and be around people that were as excited about music as I was.”
As we chat about her backstory and the band’s formation, Dabice sips tea and munches on an apple-cinnamon muffin. A couple of young women at a nearby table can’t help but listen in, and soon one of them wants to talk to her. “I’m so sorry to interrupt you,” she says. “I really love how you articulate music in your life. What is your band’s name?” Dabice leans over and tells them. “I’ve heard of y’all before,” the woman says. “That’s so cool!”
Dabice’s memory of her teen years is a little blurry, since she was diagnosed with a rare form of soft-tissue cancer right around the same time she was thinking about starting a band with some friends. “On a very molecular level, I think it changed my entire life,” she says. “I was like, ‘There’s a chance I won’t live very much longer. I want to do what I want to do with my life in a very uncompromising way.’”
She beat the cancer, but that attitude continued to fuel her through her time at University of Colorado, the lean years that followed when she found a place in Boulder’s underground punk scene (“I feel like there was 15 of us”), and a rough period in her early twenties when she moved back to Connecticut to take care of her mother, who had suffered a stroke.
Around 2010, she formed Mannequin Pussy with guitarist Athanasios Paul, taking the band’s name from an offhand joke a friend had made back in Boulder. They began gigging in Brooklyn bars as a duo; in 2015, Reading — who spent years in the all-female metal tribute bands Judas Priestess and Miss-Tallica — signed on as their drummer. “Then we were like, ‘Why are we a three-piece with no low end? This is stupid,’” Dabice recalls. “We put out a call on Facebook looking for a bass player. Bear was the first person to respond.”
The small North Carolina indie label Tiny Engines signed them in 2016 and gave them just enough money to record Romantic, the album that became their breakthrough. “It was incredibly exciting,” Dabice says.
They had virtually no budget for touring, so they’d silkscreen T-shirts they found at thrift stores for merch and stay at the cheapest motels they could find. “We’d get a single hotel room and use camping mats on the floor,” says Reading. “One night, I woke up and saw that Bear was sleeping in the van. I asked him why and he said, ‘Oh, I saw cockroaches all over the floor.’ That wasn’t great to hear after I was just sleeping on said floor.”
Around this time, Dabice went through two breakups that left her emotionally shattered. One of the relationships was physically abusive. “It was so intensely toxic,” she says, “and I never thought I would be the type of person who would end up in a relationship like that. It became a little hard to trust people again.”
She poured all of her anger and sorrow into songs like “Fear/+/Desire” (“When you hit me/It does not feel like a kiss”) and “High Horse” (“Pushing me up against the kitchen sink/I feel your breath on me, I can taste it in my teeth”). They became the emotional core of Mannequin Pussy’s third album, 2019’s Patience, even if she can’t bear to revisit them today. “We don’t do those songs in the set anymore,” Dabice says softly, once the conversation has moved from the coffee shop to a nearby park bench. “But what I learned is that you just walk around with these feelings inside you, and if you don’t find a way to transform them, they eat at you like a poison.”
One Patience song they still perform at nearly every show is “Drunk II,” about a different relationship that went south. When they play it live, everyone screams along to lines like “I still love you, you stupid fuck!” But few know that parts of the song delve into even deeper, more delicate parts of Dabice’s psyche, most notably “And everyone says to me, ‘Missy, you’re so strong’/But what if I don’t want to be?’” “That’s about being a kid with cancer,” she says. “People tell you all the time, ‘You’re strong.’ It’s the only thing that an adult knows how to say in that situation. My whole life, people have been telling me I was so strong, and I was actually falling apart inside.”
Released on Epitaph Records and produced by punk and emo mainstay Will Yip, Patience took off gradually at first, as the band toured relentlessly. By the end of 2019, it was a word-of-mouth sensation. “I thought I was Mannequin Pussy’s biggest fan, to the point where I worried I was overrating them a bit,” Rolling Stone’s Rob Sheffield wrote when he ranked Patience as his third favorite record of that year, behind only the newest offerings by Taylor Swift and Lana Del Rey. “But it turns out I was laughably underrating them all this time.”
As 2020 began, the band was booked to play Coachella on the same bill as Rage Against the Machine and Travis Scott — on the second-to-last line of the Saturday lineup, in a tiny font, but still. Then Covid hit, and the band’s momentum slowed. During the year-plus break from the road that followed, Paul — the band’s only consistent member from day one other than Dabice — quit Mannequin Pussy. “He said to me, ‘I want to get married and have a kid and do something different with my life,’” Dabice says. “It wasn’t surprising.”
It didn’t take long for them to replace him with Steen, a fixture of Philly’s underground music scene. “She brought a new dynamic to the band because she comes from the synth world,” says Reading. “Now, we have a whole new life.”
The band cut I Got Heaven earlier this year in Los Angeles with producer John Congleton (St. Vincent, Sleater-Kinney). The long gap between albums means that Dabice was in a very different place when penning the lyrics. “Patience was the aftermath of intense heartache,” Dabice says. “I Got Heaven is the longing for something new and exciting. There’s a pervasive feeling of longing and horniness to it.”
It’s impossible to miss those sentiments on the ballad “Split Me Open.” “Split me open/Pour your love into me,” Dabice sings. “My body’s a temple/It was built for you/To do all the things you dreamed you do.” “We wrote that in the middle-of-nowhere New Hampshire one day after taking acid,” Steen recalls. “We were afterglowing.”
Elsewhere on the new LP, “Loud Bark” is an old-school Mannequin Pussy song that builds to a screaming climax. It’s destined to kill in concert once they start playing it. “I remember hearing Maxine’s riff for that one,” says Dabice, “and knowing exactly what I wanted to do with it.”
NOT LONG AGO, Dabice says, she encountered a new challenge: Two major tech companies had blocked search terms that include the word “pussy,” like the name of her band. “Pains me to say it but the combination of bias, censorship and big tech are gonna be the final nail in the coffin for us,” she tweeted this spring. “It’s just too big a fight and I’m too tired.”
Talking about it now, she sounds more sanguine, but no less frustrated by the double standards involved. “If you asked an Amazon Alexa to play Mannequin Pussy, it would just shut down,” she says. “On TikTok, nothing would come up if you search our music — but if you typed in ‘Mannequin Dick,’ our music would come up. It’s a reflection of where we’re still at. It’s like, to be feminine is to be profane. That’s what we deal with.”
After she brought this issue to their attention, she says, the band’s label reached out to Amazon and TikTok and asked them to fix their algorithms. “I’m very lucky to have Epitaph,” she adds. “I think we all expected that the world would become less puritanical, but in fact the opposite is true.”
At Brooklyn Steel, the band plays three new songs in its set. Every one sets the place ablaze. The median age of the fans moshing near the front of the stage seems to be about 20. As I watch this, I can’t help but think of elders like Gene Simmons who proclaim “rock is dead.” It may not be quite as visible, and today’s rising rock bands may never make the sort of money that Kiss generated in their heyday, but acts like Mannequin Pussy prove there are still plenty of vital new ideas to be found.
Back in the dressing room before the show, I bring up the Simmons theory of rock to the band. This awakens Regisford from his slumber. “I don’t really listen to fossils,” he says. “It’s like, ‘Shut up.’”
“It’s not like we’re playing these shows to people in their sixties,” Dabice chimes in. “We’re often playing to people that are 15 and just discovering rock music for the first time. I don’t think the barometer for rock is what’s on the cover of Rolling Stone or the top of the Spotify charts. It’s at these types of shows, where people are experiencing a collective catharsis. And it’s very much alive.”