You can cling onto the rambunctiousness of youth, refusing to grow up; you can swerve hard into maturity, peel the stickers off your guitar, and hope that critical adulation follows.
On their seventh LP, Joyce Manor find a fine middle ground, and the result is their best record since 2012’s Of All Things I Will Soon Grow Tired. There’s a wistfulness to these nine tracks, which see the band journeying backwards to examine their pasts, but refusing to force profundity where there isn’t any to find. On the title track, Barry Johnson sings “I used to go to this bar / Back when I didn’t have a car / ‘cause it was close to my apartment / So that was just as far as I went.” Reflection on time past is theme enough for this record, whether or not the memories are inherently dramatic;…