Over the past decade, Mannequin Pussy have gone from the type of band with multiple tracks called “Meat Slave” to one you wouldn’t be nervous to introduce to your less punk-inclined friends, some mumbling over their name not withstanding. Their early songs tempered addictive bursts of aggression with a softer aching; they’ve continued to develop in both directions but their new songs capture that same dynamism in a more approachable package. Where leader Marisa Dabice’s voice used to be buried under the furious scurrying of her bandmates, it now towers above them in all its sickly melodic sweetness. They’ve still got plenty of fire, but they are also capable of songs like “Drunk II” and “I Got Heaven,” the title track of their fourth LP — songs where it feels like they’re reaching for something more universal than that old Mannequin Pussy, less intentionally antagonistic and more inviting.

Dabice once described her band’s songs to me as “romantic punk-pop for the ADD generation,” and the succinctness of that still applies. But with age and experience comes a softening, a determination to be more considered. I Got Heaven stretches the confines of what a Mannequin Pussy song can be. They started doing that on Patience but really commit to it here — the lovelorn yearning of “Nothing Like” or the sonic fireworks of album closer “Split Me Open” feel like exciting developments for the band.

I Got Heaven presents a slightly different configuration of Mannequin Pussy than we’re used to: longtime members Dabice, Colins “Bear” Regisford, and Kaleen Reading are still there, but they’ve added Maxine Steen to their ranks following the departure of founding guitarist Thanasi Paul. After working with go-to producer Will Yip on Patience, this time around they turned to another in-demand producer, John Congleton, heading out to Los Angeles to work on these songs in a more collaborative setting.

“Very often, especially in the band, we try to turn off the radio, so to speak,” Dabice tells me. “We don’t really listen to a lot of music when we’re in the act of creating a record because we’re so absorbed in the worlds of our own demos and our own sounds. It’s a very conscious decision, not to be too accidentally inspired in a way that someone might get upset with you.” Dabice reached back into her phone’s camera roll to see what she was consuming at the time these songs came together — the films, the life experiences, the poetry that made up the I Got Heaven moodboard.

Stream the album below, and read on for our interview.

Park Chan-wook’s Thirst, Gus Van Zant’s My Own Private Idaho, Agnès Varda’s Le Bonheur, Or Any Film That Expresses Artistic Horniness

MARISA DABICE: Last year, before the album was being made, I found myself spending a lot of time alone and indulging in that time watching different films I had been meaning to see.

I fell into a serious Park Chan-wook cinematic hole for a bit, specifically with The Handmaiden and Thirst, which I think are two absolutely glorious films. Both are so erotically driven, and yet so captivating as storytelling. There’s something really inspiring about the way both sex and sexuality and longing and desire are incorporated into the films — not as a gratuitous subplot but as something that’s a part of the very fabric of the characters in question. The way he represents longing, especially in Thirst — it’s a vampire movie at heart, but it also deals with this idea of wanting to drink someone in, the extreme closeness that comes with desire.

In a similar fashion, I had never seen My Own Private Idaho before. I was on an early Keanu kick. The film really started to click for me with the sex scenes, which were filmed as if they were paintings. These representations of sex and closeness and unrequited feelings are so powerful within the film. There’s no movement in them. It really highlighted how the act itself can be something quite artistic and beautiful and can give you this state of pause and reflection. I’d never seen a sex scene represented in that way in cinema. I thought it was such a unique and beautiful way to do it — where [Gus Van Sant] created these living paintings. It really floored me.

Another one that came up a lot was Agnés Varda movies, specifically this movie Le Bonheur, which means “happiness” in French. It’s basically about a man who is so driven with desire and his need to follow his dick wherever he wants to, but really hoping that his wife will understand how much he’s capable of loving two women at once. And she pretends to be OK with it, or she says she accepts him and then she goes and kills herself. And then he loses both people in the process of how much desire he had.

I feel like those three films were all punching on these different aspects of desire. In Gus Van Sant’s world, it was very much an unrequited longing — the longing that you experience for your best friend or someone that you’re so close to, but the relationship can’t progress past its defined boundaries. In Park Chan-wook’s world, it’s a very intense requited desire where you’re having to hide who you are, and there’s almost something manipulative about the way that desire can make you feel. And with Varda’s film, it’s about if your desire is directed in the wrong way, it can lead to the destruction of another person.

Driving Around In Silence

DABICE: When I’m in the act of writing an album, my head is so filled with different sounds and ideas and instrumentals all the time. I’m very consciously trying to get away from other people’s music so I can focus intently on what it is that we’re trying to make together. Every time I found myself in the car, I was just driving in silence. Not putting anything on, not listening to anything at home, just actually sitting in the silence of myself. I think that silence is a good companion to solitude, and I was being really intent on my own solitude and removing myself from other people for the first time in my adult life.

I live a life that’s so loud, both sonically and in a spirited sense. There’s so much music, I’m surrounded by noise all the time. So it felt like whenever I had those moments where I was able to be alone somewhere, I found myself really enjoying silence, as if it were a soundtrack. I feel like it’s something that some people are compelled to do. I once told someone that I sometimes just drive around in silence, and they seemed to think that was the most psychotic thing they’d ever heard. I was a little taken aback, and pushed back a little. Like, why do you need noise? Ultimately, I think their answer was, like, the thoughts in my own head are too intense. And it made me think about how we’re all just using songs as a salve, to get away from our own thoughts.

I was in a place where I really wanted to listen to what was going on in my own head and not have distractions. There’s a meditative quality to the sounds that come from the tires and the pavement, the sounds of the traffic around you. You get into your own mind in a different kind of way.

Cooking A Meal For Myself Or Someone Else

DABICE: That became my favorite way to spend time with people I love over the last two years.

Anyone who knows me knows my favorite fact to share, which I learned from a neuroscientist who was a guest on the AM talk show Coast To Coast, which I fucking love. The interview was about happiness and stability in the brain, and he said that based on all the research that they’ve done, there’s only three ways to build serotonin in the brain. Those ways are exercise, cooking a meal for yourself or someone else, and face-to-face interaction and conversation with someone. Those are the only things that contribute to a balanced level of serotonin in your brain. Everything else is dopamine, essentially.

I feel like once I learned that, it still took me a few years to commit to the practices of that. When you know that there might be a simple or not so simple way to feel a little bit more balanced day-in and out, there’s still something hard about getting yourself to do that, getting the energy to do those things… In the past couple years, I really clung to my solitude and single-ness for a while. I shunned going-out culture. It was very rare to see me out at a bar or drinking with anyone. I just stopped doing all that. My favorite way to be with my friends and the people who I really care about was the invite them over to cook a meal, spend that sort of time together.

Very wholesome, but I think it was about developing the skills of how to nourish yourself and how to take care of yourself. I think for people who travel a lot and touring musicians, you start to understand how elusive that home-cooked meal feeling can be. The thing I want to do when I’m home is not be outside, I don’t want to go and eat someone’s overly salted shit, I want to be at home making something. It’s about listening to your own desires again, trying to get in touch with what your body needs.

What are some of your favorite things to cook?

DABICE: I’m really into making soups and stews. That is something I love very much. A nice kimchi-jigae — those Korean stews are phenomenal and so delicious. I make a lot of shakshouka-type things, or really elaborate salads that would take like an hour of preparation to make. Lots of different ways to marinate salmon. But I’m definitely, to borrow some Gen Z language, a little soup girlie. It’s coded in me. It feels like the quickest way to get the sort of nourishment that I need.

Mary Oliver

DABICE: My first exposure to her work was probably in 2016 or 2017 when a friend of mine, Mike Shaw, was over at my house with another friend of his. I think they had a poetry club or something because they both ended up whipping out Thirst by Mary Oliver. It’s funny looking back on it because we were hanging out and the hangout became looking through this Mary Oliver book and reading out loud poems that really spoke to us.

I still remember the first Mary Oliver poem that I was so taken by. It had an emotional grab on me immediately. just because of the simplicity of it. It was in that book Thirst and the poem was called “The Uses Of Sorrow.” And she starts with a parenthesis that says “(In my sleep I dreamed this poem)” and then: “Someone I loved once gave me/ a box full of darkness/ It took me years to understand/ that this, too, was a gift.”

I was going through a pretty immense heartbreak in my life when I read that poem. That was around the Romantic/Patience era, where my heart had been phenomenally broken. I felt like it was one of those things where you find the words at the exact right time. To be able to recognize… Oh, OK, yes, one day years from now I might be able to look back on this and think that it was a gift to have a broken heart, that this was the redirection of my life that I needed. Something profoundly changed for me that night, the way that I viewed breakups. Not that I couldn’t have my heart broken again, but I think I understand the importance in accepting that sort of redirection in your life. A breakup is a gift because a breakup frees you to find what you’re meant for, and it frees that other person to find what they’re meant for…

I think so much about Mary Oliver is fascinating. Even beyond her use of language, she has got such a reverence for nature. She lingered very deeply when we were writing I Got Heaven. Especially with a lot of the imagery surrounding the record — pastoral scenes and nature scenes and animals and how we all find ourselves living on this planet at the same time. Mary Oliver — she’s so horny for nature. That is her ultimate. She wakes up and cannot wait to greet the blueberries. I find that so inspiring, the way that she sees the littlest aspects of nature. I love her.

As a writer, I’m always curious about the lyric process. Since we’re talking about a poet, how do you approach writing lyrics? Do you feel like you’re writing poetry or does it feel like something different?

DABICE: There’s an aspect of making an album, after the record is done, when you have to go and type out all the lyrics so they can be shared with friends and uploaded and used on the insert or whatever. That’s a really interesting experience for me because I get to see which songs of mine I think could actually qualify as being a poem when typed out and seen. Some of the songs have a musicality to them and the way that they’re structured are really more lyrics, but there are two songs on the record that come to mind to me as, yes, I think that they could be poems… I think there’s a distinction between a lyric and something that is actually poetry, but maybe I’m being self-deprecating. They’re no Mary Oliver, obviously, but…

I think “I Got Heaven” is definitely one of the most poem-like songs on the record. That song was very intimidating to me when we finalized the instrumental. I had the melody for the verses. Usually my melodies will form before the lyrics, so I’ll have an idea and work backwards. So the melody here means there’s eight syllables in each stanza, so I have to write eight syllables of words in each stanza… You start a lot of blank spaces. I wrote the chorus of this immediately — the first time Maxine played that riff, that was the first thing I sung: “I got heaven inside of me.” So that really informed a lot of the lyrical attitudes of that song. It’s a lot of words, and it’s so staccato-driven. It allowed for a lot of space and the ability to say something to the fullest extent that I wanted to. That’s what you end up doing a lot as a musician in this artform — you have a limited amount of time to really say what it is you need to say.

And the last song on the record, “Split Me Open,” is very much, to me, a poem of longing. I could play dumb about it, but there’s an intentional bit of a filthy joke in there. I think it’s fun to consider yourself a serious artist but slip in a cum joke. I will pat myself on the pack for that… There were so many things that I wanted to say in “Split Me Open.” It’s not a typical song with a verse and a chorus, there’s just a part A and a part B. When we were recording, I forced the band to make part A longer than maybe it felt almost natural to be. So the part where it drops out and becomes very quiet and i get to the line “I’m worried I want you with the power of a thousand suns burning as one” … I was really insistent, and I felt like I got a little it of pushback from the band saying that it was too long and we should get to the next part.

Normally, I would say they’re right, I’m usually really good about letting a lyric go if there’s not enough space for something. I think that’s an old Mannequin Pussy thing to do, chasing the minute-thirty burst, but there was something I really needed to say and I needed to change the structure of the song in order for me to do that. For me, I had to fit it in so the second part could really collapse in on itself. The first part of that song is setting up how much you desire someone — all m thoughts are consumed with how much I want you — only for the ending of the song to be like… Nope! It’s not actually the time or the place for my desire, so I’m going to walk away from this.

Pigs

How did you come up with the idea for the cover art?

DABICE: It started being formed while we were recording. I loved working with John Congleton. It was such a wonderful artistic experience to have him be a part of the record, the five of us working to create something together. We learned really quickly that John has this really similar sense of perverted humor that is very aligned with the members of Mannequin Pussy. I would describe a lot of our humors as very devious. There’s a lot of innuendo and filth that we find really funny.

For some reason, pigs kept coming up whenever we were together prior to recording. We would be sharing a lot of pig memes with each other — to be crass, a lot of “hog-cranking” memes. We would talk about whether a song was a “pork-puller” or a “hog-cranker” — we felt there was a very serious distinction between the two. There was all this growing pig imagery, and as soon as we got into the studio with John, one of the first things he called us was his little piglets, and we started laughing because for the last year we had been talking about pigs and calling each other that same sort of thing. So we became his little piglets and he became our hogfather.

That’s really where it started. When we were getting into the album art and the visual world we were going to be created, I started working with people outside of the band for the first time. Honestly, I had been feeling really overwhelmed with the amount of things that one has to do, it’s kind of shocking that I ever did all of those things alone. I started working with Slips Studios, my friends Anthony Miralles and Mason Mercer, to help make this visual world and be involved as creative directors.

I started relaying these stories, how the imagery that keeps coming to me is pigs and farms. But not in this “cottagecore” way, in this feral animal being domesticated way. This really intense and really violent relationship that exists between pig and human pig. Maybe second only to the cow, or maybe third after human-to-human, which is probably the most violent relationship there is.

We kept playing with this imagery, and we kept talking about this image of a woman and a pig — a sort of Romantic era painting. Something I love about the Romantic era is how the paintings were so conscious about combining lightness and dark together, where a figure would very often be shrouded in darkness but there would be this glimmer of light up in the corner, waiting to shine and show this figure the path forward. I think that’s often very true for periods of our lives that we find ourselves in that are tougher than what came before, that we enter a moment that’s shrouded in darkness and the only way to get through it is remembering that there is possibly al light that lays ahead of you.

We wanted to create a really ambiguous, striking image that played a little bit with this feeling of I Got Heaven and divine companionship. On the cover, it’s up to the interpretation of the viewer. Is this figure leading the pig to slaughter or leading it to safety? What it inspires in someone is probably a good reflection of how they see that relationship between human being and animal.

Something I started noticing, when the album began coming into focus and pigs were becoming very present in my life, I noticed that — and it felt so silly that I wasn’t immediately aware of this — I have a collection of pigs in my apartment. In different walks of life, I have squealed over pigs. Different people in my life, both friends and lovers, have bought me pigs. I have a pig planter, I have a pig sculpture, I had a pig weed pipe for a long time — he lost his ears and one of his eyes but you can still smoke him. And there’s a little pig with angel wings on my fridge. When I was home, as I often was in the past year, it was like, oh my god, there are pigs all around me. Something I knew I really liked but there was that strange connection all of a sudden — now I’m getting to play with pigs in a much realer way.

When I went out to LA to do the album cover, I got to meet so many different pigs — like a “who would be the star” type thing. What’s your temperament, you little piggy? Do you want to be a star? The pig’s name ended up being Harry, which was also the name of my first love. My first boyfriend was named Harry.

There are a few times on the album where you talk about wild animals, or compare yourself to an animal — on “I’ve Got Heaven” or “Loud Bark,” you break free from captivity…

DABICE: In the process of writing out the lyrics, I realized that I compare myself to an animal frequently on this record. Where I feel like I’m shunning the domestication of myself, really wanting to be feral, really wanting to be free.

In a strange way, a band creates its own vocabulary with each other. I started to play guitar less and less live because it was more fun to be able to use your body as you want to on stage, be able to prowl and stalk and use the stage as a prop. And Bear would call it, “Missy’s unleashed,” like it’s time to take the leash off her, let’s go. The guitar was this thing holding me back, like the guitar was its own collar or leash that was preventing me from being as wild as I wanted to be. “Missy unleashed” ended up finding its way into a lot of the imagery within the lyrics.

Crushing On People Who Live Far Away

I feel like because you are transient so much, on tour, that’s always how it’s going to be.

DABICE: Absolutely, unfortunately. It’s not even like you live in one place and they live in another. You physically, by virtue of this lifestyle, are creating distance between yourself and other people constantly. It’s almost like, depending on which way in the States you’re going, you’re either getting closer to that desire or you’re getting miles further away. You end up meeting people all over, but everyone feels like this fantasy that you can’t indulge in.

A lot of this record came in the shadow-period, or whatever you would call it, in the fall of 2021. I ended my last relationship, and when that relationship ended I realized I had been someone’s girlfriend for basically over 10 years straight. I had been one of those serial monogamy people, where a relationship would end and sometimes months later, sometimes weeks later, sometimes days later I would find myself embroiled in another person. And sometimes not really wanting to be, but feeling the flattery of someone wanting to choose you — that’s what you’re supposed to do when someone chooses you. Especially for women, we’re trained to be demure and accepting of attention, where I should be grateful that someone … not grateful, exactly, but that I should give this person a chance. What I’ve been told my whole life is that I should be with someone.

When that relationship ended, I felt really strongly that I should be intentionally alone. I even told myself to take two years. I found so many of my relationships to be intensely distracting to my work, where they all start out being so enamored and excited by these things that I do, but then ultimately it’s like, Oh, you have to tour? And I’m like, I absolutely do, that’s something we’ll have to deal with and it’s going to take a lot of patience and imagination to date someone who is often traveling.

It circles back to what we were talking about with Thirst and My Own Private Idaho — that expectation of desire, wanting something and maybe getting it but it not being satisfying.

DABICE: Yeah, definitely. I think as human beings we’re almost like dogs chasing cars. If you catch the car, you don’t know what to do with it.

I Got Heaven is out 3/1 via Epitaph.