Joyce Manor On Their Latest Album ‘I Used To Go To This Bar’

Share

Published February 6, 2026 by Peyton Bernhardt

There’s a particular brand of chaos that has always lived inside Joyce Manor songs.

Melody comes in bursts, guitars sound like they’re about to fall apart, but never quite do. Each song sounds like a confession, pulled from the quietest, ugliest, most honest corners of everyday life.

On their new record I Used To Go To This Bar, Joyce Manor are proud of who they are, and distil themselves perfectly into just under 20 minutes.

Frontman Barry Johnson, guitarist Chase Knobbe, and bassist Matt Ebert logged on together to reflect on the release (their seventh), showing up less like a band promoting a record and more like old friends taking stock of their career.

They detail the inception of the album, tracing it back to a session where things weren’t working.

“We went in and did a session that didn’t go well at all,” Johnson recalls.

“The material was not really there…The first stuff that actually made the record was then recorded in January of 2024.” That material became title track ‘I Used To Go To This Bar’ and anthemic single ‘All My Friends Are So Depressed’, recorded in the same session.

The temptation to release them immediately was strong – there was consideration to drop them as singles, combatted by the underlying fear that they might be overlooked as the belters they are without a full album rollout.

Pressure mounted when the band featured on comedian John Mulaney’s John Mulaney Presents: Everybody’s in LA later that year, but it took another year of writing for the record to come to fruition.

“The label wanted something ASAP, which is good,” Johnson adds.

“I like the pressure. I’ve got to have something to force me to get my head in the game. And I think we wrote the best material towards the end…it was the session that had ‘The Opossum’ and ‘Grey Guitar’. Now we’re cooking, that’s how I felt.”

Tracks like ‘Grey Guitar’ stretch their signature into something heavier, moodier and almost cinematic. There’s an eerie weight behind the lyrics: “I said, ‘I think Danielle’s dead’/I mean, she might be alive/But it just doesn’t seem likely, got this feeling inside.”

“I had the first verse for a long time,” Johnson says, dating it back to drafting for a previous record, 2016’s Cody. “But the chorus was way more recent.” When the parts finally merged, something darker manifested almost accidentally.

“The second verse just came really quickly. ‘A thousand swords in her mind’, I loved that line. And ‘I popped the trunk in my car but there’s nothing inside’. That felt spooky.”

He draws comparisons to Twin Peaks, adding: “Like someone getting premonitions about a murder. That vibe of, I think something terrible happened but I can’t explain why.”

Musically, it’s anchored by Knobbe’s anxious, ominous riff.

“That whole song is built around that mean-ass riff,” Johnson says proudly. “It sounds paranoid. Ominous. It sounds like the lyrics feel.”

Produced by Bad Religion’s Brett Gurewitz, I Used To Go To This Bar also features the reincarnation of a catalogue rarity that is largely credited as being Joyce Manor’s first song: ‘Fuck Koalacaust’, reborn as eighth track, ‘Well, Don’t It Seem Like You’ve Been Here Before?’

“I was really excited to change the name of the song because I got really sick of the inside joke title,” Johnson laughs. Gurewitz hadn’t picked up on it, but the band eventually told him about the track’s origins. “I don’t care, it’s awesome,” Johnson recalls him saying. “It’s fine. No one’s even going to fucking know,” Gurewitz reportedly commented.

Johnson adds:

“A lot of people know. People are going to know that”, but upon reflection: “It’s 15 years since our first album, so it’s nice to tie things back into the past and it feels like a little bow.”

That callback included, I Used To Go To This Bar truly is Joyce Manor in their purest and peak form, a sentiment unanimously agreed upon by each band member signed onto our Zoom call ahead of its release.

“It’s sort of like you’re not so much finding out who you are, but it’s more doubling down on who you are,” Johnson states. He considers recording ‘The Jerk’ off 2014’s retrospectively-lauded Never Hungover Again and feeling like he was surprising himself with how the songs were coming out. “I kind of couldn’t believe it,” he remembers. “But I think with this record, I feel personally really confident in the studio now taking an idea and seeing it through and letting the process happen, and then being really proud of the end result.”

“I think it is very much a distillation of who we are and especially where our band is at now, seven albums of refining our music and Barry refining his lyrics. And yeah, I mean, it feels very much us to me in a way that I love,” Ebert agrees.

Knobbe adds his thoughts prior to us closing the interview. “I feel like we were able to do things confidently and listen back and feel like it sounds like us and we’re not doing this huge departure, or even that we just have too big of shoes to fill. It sounds like we did it confidently.”