Mannequin Pussy w/ Ganser

At the start of 2020, everything was looking up for Mannequin Pussy. The Philadelphia punk band had released their third album, Patience, to abundant critical acclaim, and was touring steadily behind it. After nearly a decade of playing, the band finally had gotten the chance to turn music into a full-time occupation. And then, just as their career was lifting off, the world around them collapsed. COVID-19 reached the United States, rescinding life as many people knew it. Live music shut down. Mannequin Pussy had just played a final show in Chicago when the group had to cancel the remainder of their tour and travel back to their home city. For a while, it seemed like maybe the lull would be temporary, a brief pause before things could resume as they were. And then the numbers ballooned, and the months stretched on, and memories of rooms packed with strangers started to feel alien, dangerous even in imagination.

Mannequin Pussy's new Perfect EP bursts forth from those sprawling months of social isolation and internet-fueled anxiety. After spending most of the year apart from each other and everyone else in 2020, the members of the band -- Missy Dabice on lead vocals and guitar, Bear Regisford on bass, and Kaleen Reading on drums -- decided to book studio time and work together in person again. They brought two pre-written songs into the session, but opted to write new material together on the fly from the excitement of reunion. "We just figured if we forced ourselves into this situation where someone could hit 'record,' something might come out," Missy says. "We'd never written that way before."

What came out of that compressed session time were some of Mannequin Pussy's most furious, incandescent songs yet. The self-imposed restraint and careful habituation of the past year cracked open. On the EP's title track, Missy sings about the practice of condensing your daily life into a manicured stream of images for social media, an urge that only intensified after daily life grew barren. What happens to the social impulse when everyone you love or even like is leveled into a set of pixels -- when you're compelled repeatedly to funnel your own life into that algorithmic slurry, and wait to see how it's received? "It was a really weird psychological experience, being bombarded by images of other people constantly when you are not around a lot of other people," Missy says. "I'm still understanding the way we use the internet to make our lives feel and look perfect. Our lives aren't supposed to look good right now." 

Ganser combines post-punk workmanship and noise rock tendencies, inspired by cinematic visuals and imagist language. Composed of keyboardist/vocalist Nadia Garofalo, bassist/vocalist Alicia Gaines, drummer Brian Cundiff and guitarist Charlie Landsman, equal parts Space Odyssey and Ghost World, this Chicago-based band channels anxiety’s heightened state to absurd ends.

In 2020, Ganser navigated the tricky task of releasing their LP Just Look at That Sky during the height of a pandemic, not realizing that its art rock tendencies, dark humor, and themes of internal emotional weather would resonate with the likes of Rolling Stone, The Quietus, Paste, Vice, Sound Opinions, Bandcamp, Brooklyn Vegan, and more year-end lists. They returned in 2021 with Look at the Sun, a collection of remixes by GLOK (Andy Bell), Sad13 (Sadie Dupuis), Algiers, Girl Band’s Adam Faulkner, and Bartees Strange.

Rain Location: Der Rathskeller