Pissed Jeans: Half Divorced – album review and interview.

Pissed Jeans: Half Divorced

(Sub Pop)

CD | DL | LP

Available at Sister Ray

Released 1st March, 2024

Through the discordant hum of modern life’s existential meat market, blinkered and bleating from the deep abyss of another night’s sleep lost to the ceiling of a chilly memory mausoleum, only followed by an equally torturous spell navigating through the minotaur’s desktop, bands like Pissed Jeans provide the perfect sonic lubricant to loosen up all our innermost, psychotic hydrants: Half-divorced, but firmly in the thick of it. An interview with their frontman, Matt Korvette reveals what life is like there. By Ryan Lewis Walker.

Half-divorced.

Just the half. A whole divorce would be too much. Lost forever. Disjointed. Dislocated. Disconnected. Adrift. Possibly swallowed whole. Possibly partially spared as a piece until last. The void in view. Our toes begin to crumble and turn to dust as they reach its event horizon.

Dislocation from what? Divorced from what horrors? Half-severed from what?

On their new album, Pissed Jeans manage to tap their calloused fingers against and inject their skewed, contused grooves into, the raw nerves, the soft arterial silk veins that straddle a particular passage where this ‘half’ – this very special half – playfully wreaks havoc.

It wreaks havoc because it’s only half of something – half the divorce, half of paying heed or feeding the desired levels of attention to some cajoling, comedic fuckwit. Coaxing your vulnerability into the open then piercing its skin with a pair of savage fangs. A mosquito that keeps on sucking those dregs dry.

Yet, the new album from Pissed Jeans, completed by Brad Fry (guitar), Randy Huth (bass) and Sean McGuinness (drums), is an empowering, unstoppable beat of immense wholesomeness; a total battalion of whirling noises, some quicker than a heartbeat, others taking longer to navigate through and recuperate from, and all is a beast from heaven in spite of the half. In spite of the all-seeing fuckwit.

Their fifth LP on Sub Pop is empowering because it locates a sufficient set of pliers to unscrew this abscessed, cancerous tooth from our gums. It’s empowering in all the right places and violent in all the right ways because it denies further access to the storm/stress of those malevolent forces that zoom into and hoover up your bones from your skin in a blink: a den of pious reptiles, social media sucklers, salivating narcissists, pernicious invaders impinging upon a delicate, fasciated flower, uniquely bruised and devalued, a confused soul: to hell with all confessionals.

A creature to be pitied, plighted by the mind and pitted against its own body, a mind which is prized open and replaced by new images each day, an old photograph in an offset frame, faces deformed, backgrounds distorted, eyes and smiles wired up wrong, events questioned, answers ignored, objects dislodged, emotions challenged, opinions altered, furniture moved: a disturbing attempt to dismantle and replace one version of reality with another.

In doing so, one is concurrently convincing and here wrestling with oneself, that all the bundles of errors and mistakes we poor, miserable fuckers, we sad-sack, tree-sap, hunchbacked victims in our own unique ways are plagued by, are solely our sodding inventions and have been since the onset of such a post-apocalyptic synopsis forced us to seek out some sort of professional help. “Half Divorced has an aggression within it, in terms of saying, I don’t want this reality” say the band. “There’s a power in being able to say, I realise you want me to pay attention to these things, but I’m telling you that they don’t matter. I’m already looking elsewhere.”

When we finally escape the maze, the hall of mirrors, and look elsewhere, we find this.

Opening explosion, Killing All The Wrong People, doesn’t just sweep the rug from under our feet but amputates the legs from the thighs down. One of those openers that has to be played a million times; an opener to open all albums; a violent scuttle of sharp objects eating away at a bed of soft surfaces; radioactive, white-hot guitars, reptile rhythms with a vengeance, vocals that howl into a volcano and fall in for eternity.

Punk lampooned? Lambasted? No.

But hardcore (possibly post-, maybe proto-, even anti-) is chopped and chewed up and punk is crushed into boxes with the palpitating, battery-powered animal rhythms of Anti-Sapio and Cling to a Poisoned Dream.

The former screeches and sizzles like an inflamed, igneous parade down a straight line but occasionally diverts from it, attracted to the temptations that outline the path of tradition: roadkill saloons, milkshake parlours, midnight dive bars, hamburger stands. The latter is both a bug-eyed bulge and an unzipped brigade of skin-blistering, sky-shaking electric guitars and hideous, sickle-to-cervix chords that tastes like wrapping your tongue around a razorblade.

Punk is the predominant power supply the group employ, a hapless dunce the band drill into, a sex doll the band do with as they please, in all their haphazard yet intensely strategic and homogeneous nature to bust into and bruise those traditions into new shapes of amusement, artillery distillation and manic noise groove. It’s a sonic beating of many malleable reference points, a mediaeval-capped battering ram to besiege some sacred city and besmirch it with their own snarling demeanour.

Despite the weight and speed of the album, it’s one that cries out to be repeated. It soundtracks the various rushes and ruses of the day that anyone with a brain and a valve to untwist can access. The band are fucking with a particularly mangled pop-punk formula, fucking with having ‘fun’ even.

“Is it weird to say that I love listening to it on repeat myself? If you’re gonna make music, you might as well personally enjoy listening to it, I say! I think it just came together once we had the songs, and got them recorded,” Matt states. “Nothing was overtly planned in advance; we kinda just roll with it and see what happens. If anything was kind of pre-planned, I really wanted us to put out an album of songs that would be fun to play live, and it feels like we succeeded on that front.”

“We really wanted to show the world that we were still a band, and after we got our Covid shots and started practising again in 2021, we really tried to buckle down and write enough new stuff to record it,” Matt adds, on their adamancy that there’s still life kicking away within the group. Life demanding to be heard.

All manner of mangled, cubist chords and post-crucifixion physique jive; a slow, stuttering, stuttering stampede of turbocharged, chain-choked anger exorcisms with appendages dropping off upon each molten warble, dropkick and flourish, buckling down birthed songs like Sixty–Two Thousand Dollars in Debt. Bestial bass and unruly guitars are dragged through a wasteland of diamonds and lava, sick limbs stained black and held together by pieces of frayed rope.

Buckling down also birthed Helicopter Parent. How it burns up and breaks down but rebuilds and regains energy, speed, strength and size the more it perseveres in crawling towards us; the obstinate undying fucker.

An art project first and foremost, the performance of Pissed Jeans is never as it seems. Replete with details that nestle cosily under your skin, a parasitic hypnotism that eventually eats your fingers, nothing is ever obvious. There’s always something captivating in the curvatures of each apparent knot. There is always more below the surface, an attempt at varnish but the venom of abstraction and carnage still oozes through like mould through the skirting boards, infecting everything it comes into contact with.

Perhaps it’s a presupposed idea that hardcore punk, or punk in general, has to keep the parcels coming in fresh off the conveyor belt, but in their case, things ferment and gestate and gradually assemble. Then, when they’re ready, they’re really ready. Something has to happen for a band to adopt this approach – their entire repertoire is about the art that encompasses all.

“We have no reasonable excuse for taking so long, except yes, as you mentioned, not wanting to churn out new albums just for the sake of them. It takes us a while to really whittle it down to our best material, stuff we’re super proud of,” Matt says. “Since the band isn’t a career for us, and we don’t depend on it to pay the bills, we have the luxury of trying to make it the best ‘art project’ it can be for us, which feels fitting.”

Pissed Jeans as an art project rocks.

It rocks because of tunes like Everywhere Is Bad, which animates the body and activates the mind, a dirty, deranged classic power-pop shanty, a charcoal chant of empowering unification, an absurdist playground of both backing and lead vox that fall over and fade into each other. Witness guitars unshackled from gulag walls get their revenge on what has ruined them, what aches and pains have ravaged those drums throughout the years, reduced to nothing yet still sparkle with life when a live wire glides across the surface of a shallow puddle in a mechanic’s demonic workshop.

It also rocks because of the lyrics on Junktime, some depraved insight from a comic strip designed by Bukowski with an empty drinks cabinet: “The worker’s arms look like an old leather jacket/some pretty cute thing to call an infectious cancer rash/my neighbour claimed that he could taste the weather, as the flames floated over my black-like Santa Clause/ I only found all this out a few days later, when it happened I just thought my screen was on pause.”

Beat Poetry to Black Flag on Blast First? Such astute lunacy rambles deserve similarly troubled accompaniment. In this case, the song erupts to the heat-seeking stabs and backyard clangs of metal scraps tossed on a monstrous heap. It stamps the arse with a propane branding iron. A menacing mangled, garage jam, all scolding, spiky psychoactive grooves and monstrous motorik power.

How do we escape the image of such surreal snippets, fractured frames, occurrences and madhouse accounts?

There is no escape. One is simply engulfed.

Neither cyanide nor painkiller, easy to digest but still insisting on digging its miserable way back up from the stomach, the album questions the quality of the placebo we have just bitten into. It’s a risk we all take.

Pissed Jeans are a group interested in the idea of the midway point between youthful optimism and the sobering reality; a reality that adulthood likes to spit in your eye whilst laughing, a bucket of cold water to the face in the morning or like stepping barefoot in a tiny pile of newly microwaved jelly: surprise! You’re late. Surprise! You’re lazy. Sucker. You’re an adult. You’re a nobody. Sorry.

But what if that soft spot between youth and tooth decay, between blissful, if ignorant, optimism and the sheer merciless sting of existential madness can be harnessed? What if, like Pissed Jeans do here on Half-Divorced, they coexist on both sides of the mixtape. Both an epitaph and epiphany for ways thank-god bygone and barely new that the band revels in, a building of sandcastles of sonic noise and battered garage punk, then suddenly kicking them over, a self-inflicted trauma.

Side A would be dedicated to youthful optimism. Sobering adulthood on the flip.
A mixtape grasped in a sweaty palm, shaking, somehow steadies as it holds it for longer it is the antidote to the ennui of everything and everyone.

A mixtape, a manifesto, passed around; a bloodied commune exchange, somewhere between the intense instrumental stampedes shot from the jaws of an insomniac’s favourite record by doom behemoths Sleep and fierce, fearless pioneering noise punk urchins Scratch Acid; between No Trend/No Age and Negative Trend, between the breakneck rollercoaster cyclones of Circle Jerks or Cosmic Psychos, between the hard-hitting melodic euphoria of Hüsker Dü and the earlobe eating, sonic bricolage rumbles of Hella. This mixtape, this equator, this new record, is the place where new things turn into newer things – something sprouting from below the undergrowth, an ugly head revealed, but blink and you’ll miss the metamorphosis in all its abhorrent glory. It’s every bit as raucous and carnivorous as it sounds.

“Usually, someone comes to practice with a musical idea, be it just a riff, or a fully-realised song (which is less common). We all kinda bash it out, and see what sticks and feels best,” Matt says on their process this time around – the same as it always is, to be frank. “We tried writing songs separately/digitally during Covid, but it really just never took – I think we need to all be in the room together. It’s also some of the most fun I have in the band, writing songs together and working it out.”

Another ripped stitch. Another perforated eardrum. Another form to fill. Another underperforming thyroid. Another overworked mind. Another disappointing encounter with somebody, somewhere. The abyss and utopia. The pigsty and the spotlight. The armchair and the dancefloor. Pissed Jeans persist. They mean it muuuuuuum.

The kings of this mediating space between rock and hard place, between thrive and fail, between illiterate rebellion and conviction of the highest state of lucidity and decisiveness.
They mean it maaaaaaan.

Reflect and try not to feel so repulsed, so light in the head, so sick in the stomach. Respond and not so easily react against it.

The ghost is your own wandering past, young man.

The Frankenstein’s monster is your own historical body in the mirror, dear boy.

The rumours are true. Every day is a waiting room between neither here nor there – a dead zone of corporeal neutrality, motion picture enervation, a psychic receptionist eternally chewing gum and curling her hair with a pencil. Ugh. One day we wake up and find ourselves finally arrived in a patient’s gown and a number inked into our wrist. Meat on the slab.

And down the drainage pipes, we slide.

Just what do we remember?

The formative spectacle of the pandemic that threw our perceptions of reality into the air, that challenged and shattered the backlog of illusions that had been building up for so long in the various toothpaste tubes of truth, finally burst through and unspooled a shiver down the worldwide spines that send people’s minds spinning and lives spiralling out of control. But in the wake of such calamity, just beyond the shadows of such outright disarray, the borderlands and alien terrains of the world as we know it (and you feel…fine?) came a new kind of equilibrium that the band embraced as though the gauze gripped to their faces had been removed and at last – clarity.

“I think for myself and a lot of people, the pre-vaccine pandemic really kind of separated our lives into a before and after,” the band states. “There’s something about that time, over a year of really doing nothing, that gave me a pretty clear sensation of what it was like to be young, and suddenly, to be old.”

Indeed, the pandemic provided people with new leases of life, new lenses suddenly wiped tidy despite the plights and emotional plunders it pushed against the globe to eventually get there. “Maybe if life just kept rolling smoothly and Covid didn’t exist, I wouldn’t have felt this way, or at least felt it so distinctly?” they say. “I’m glad to be alive, and still feel like a teenager in some mental/social ways, though my body has certainly never felt older. I suppose I find that to be interesting!”

Alive With Hate is a split-personality chorus revealing both sides at the same time. All window-shattering, feedback-spitting guitars, venomous saliva-stench vocals, ballistic rhythms drenched in sweat and draped in the flesh they have just torn from the bone, a total smelted experiment in brain-blowing noise.

The word “divorce” has a strong, strange relationship to humiliation, dehumanisation, isolation and shame that are held up for all to see on this album. Tearing down the curtain, wearing a short-sleeve t-shirt after years of neglect to reveal the withered limbs and scars of a million narcissists, all in the name of declaring “divorce”, is a powerful tool, a conceptual weapon that can signpost a severance with one thing, but in this case – the half – it indicates there’s still a point to prove in the old world that’s snagged one’s ankle. Exposure and awareness to these things can be exhausting yeah, but empowering too.

“Pissed Jeans have always been a way for me to look at dark, distressing things right in the face and call them out. It’s fun to try to bring up things that aren’t spoken about in good company, and honestly, I just FEEL BETTER after doing it,” declares Matt. “If you name the thing that makes you sad or uncomfortable in a public way, it kind of takes away some of the power that thing had over you. Or at least that’s how it has worked for me.”

With Half-Divorced, there’s a negation of accepting a certain reality that others expect you to swallow and follow but as you say – “There’s a power in being able to say, I realize you want me to pay attention to these things, but I’m telling you that they don’t matter. I’m already looking elsewhere.”

In the echo chamber, the only discourse taking place is between the walls and the one within it. Self-sentenced to silence. But the textbook social terrorist often likes it that way. Knows no different. They are the start and end of themselves. There’s a sense of encouragement to not just realize that people can take advantage of you, that people can rip you to smaller shreds each day according to the twisted whims of their own septic/seraphic devices, but using that very realisation to beat them at their own game.

“With the way that social media has usurped so much of our time and human engagement, it really pushes us all to behave a certain way, to fit into clean boxes, to pick a clear side. It’s so limiting and stupid and annoying and I hate it!” Matt announces. “I feel like we’re so often being told to make binary choices, and I’m trying to say, why not something else entirely? Who is making these rules, and why are we following them?”

But mind you, if you’ve made it this far and can’t quite stomach the idea of a punk band calling themselves an art project (note: why are you here?) or you can’t bear to embrace the stark naked neuroticisms of a punk band currently at a terminal of both crisis point and critical rebirth, in both their personal lives and creative endeavours, then how about the idea of a band not so much making music but making something akin to ‘violent absurdity’? It has a ring to it, right?

Such frolics and larks! Such ways to spend one’s time. With Pissed Jeans, and on songs like (Stolen) Catalytic Converter, a mangled, cataclysmic stew of sludge-pustule noise rock and unhinged, psychedelic mucoid melodies that liquefies the floor and then suddenly hardens when you’re below the knee in its trembling body, there’s fantastic, fastidious humour within each hard-hitting minute. Everything explored somehow sheared down to the bone. Human nature is exposed as some ridiculous parade of the every day; a cumbersome Amazon package of the unfamiliar and utterly common, all bare and bleeding for what it really is: a load of old bollocks.

Seemingly abrupt but makes the most racket, a similar violently absurdist interpretation/reaction (or simply: recitation) of everyday events, Seatbelt Alarm Silencer comes and goes like an intergalactic car crash on the dual carriageway, a mixed litter of carrion outlining the roadsides under the overdrive of the daytime sun, an unholy mess that exhales smoke rings into an opening in the tired sky.

Absurdity – with a violent edge. Or violence – with a jagged, absurdist wave charging through it. Maybe this kind of dexterous lyrical band, this uncompromising, raw recollection of what is right under our noses, under the skin, behind the eyes, in the pockets, this violent absurdity (or absurd violence) is what’s needed to explain certain situations and states of mind. It’s been there since the start. It’s in songs like Ashamed of My Cum from their debut Shallow, to Caught Licking Leather on their Sub Pop debut, to Marine Asset Financial Analyst or Have You Ever Been Furniture from the latest LP Why Love Now.

“I mean, I’d love to live in a world without violent absurdity! That sounds so relaxing and pleasant,” ponders Matt. “It really can feel like life is cheaper than ever, which makes me feel terrible. Maybe humans have always been this disturbed and awful, though, and we’re just more attuned to the horrors? A mental awakening is the first step, anyway.”

Monsters firmly fixes a boiling point between the eyes, forcing us to stand on our tiptoes as something shoots through the tops of our skulls. Electric guitars hiss against their rattling amps like they’re whispering to each other in some sacred, codified language, before the ultimate rush kicks in by way of rambunctious, garage cadence massacre, wild animal rhythms that play with sticks of dynamite with the same delicacy as a line of dominos, all sonically dwarfing and disseminating each other but behaving as one analogous blob.

Eventually, the mesh netting from their surface is ripped away quicker than posters are torn from a student’s walls – once into Green Day, now into Germs; once into Busted, now into Breeders. All noise dissolves into brief experiments of ambience-like crackles, some eerie, magnetic, magmatic rasp radiating from the floor after someone has been dropped from a gallows pole.

All killer-blizzard rhythms, and mucus mountains of putrid, joyous mutant melodies, Moving On is a gigantic crash of classic punk rock with an atonal, splintering gothic edge grating against its noisy pop catchiness. A frantic surge of Fry’s frazzled, cyborg electric guitars licks unravelling at various points of riot like a spillage of mind-altering chemicals in the aisles of one’s boiling-hot live wire eye, an immovable bass anchored into a screaming root from Huth and McGuinness’ steadfast drums keep everything directed down the path despite a tidal wave of combative solos disturbing all senses of sanity.

Another cracked knee and creak in a piece of the increasingly antique body we didn’t know had a name. The body that betrays us. The mind that abandons us. Another torn ligament. Another premium subscription. Another effects pedal. Another tough deal. Another intangible dream. Another rotten problem frustratingly impregnating our lives and requires some psychological root canal to omit and prevent further conflict creeping up. Another street preacher clings to a megaphone in one hand and a crucifix in the other. Another message left after the tone, a million messages and whole tones ago. Pissed Jeans prevail.

This is an album crammed but never wholly congested (check out the half an hour album length) with an unrelenting dynamo of ruthless, punk rock powder kegs, influences far and wide, an album using and abusing the caustic rush and chaotic thrust of punk, in all its myriad permutations, a seismic shattering of the byzantine mosaic into more pieces each time the tesserae is nervously teased by a nearby hammer, all for the thrill of seeing it squirm, seeing it eaten and moulded into strange shapes that this pit of liminality. This purgatorial geyser, this head-melting lagoon, can vaporize them, like standing on a grid on the streets of New York.

It turns out that midway between the battleground where youth and adulthood like to spend their time isn’t so bad. It might actually be…comfortable, it might actually be acceptable… but calling it violently absurd is better.

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Photos by Ebru Yildiz ©

All words by Ryan Walker.