A MORE PERFECT PUSSY

A MORE PERFECT PUSSY

Mannequin Pussy’s Marisa Dabice has always felt like she’s living on borrowed time. Her bold new album proves she’s making the most of it.

Michael Tedder

Delayed gratification is often the sweetest. I don’t think I’ve ever been happier to see a band than I was to see Mannequin Pussy on July 30, 2021, at the Jersey City, N.J., venue White Eagle Hall.

By that point I hadn’t felt the intrinsic connection of live music in 20 months. I was ready for it, as was everyone else in the room, none more so than Mannequin Pussy frontwoman Marisa “Missy” Dabice.

She was sporting pink hair and a black-and-silver sparkly jacket and, as ever, was in no mood to quell her tongue. It took her only a few songs to look out into the audience and announce with solemn authority that “if you are not vaccinated, fucking leave.” The reply was rapturous, yet somehow the evening would soon get even more emotionally cleansing.

After bassist Colins “Bear” Regisford took a lead vocal on the anti-cop anthem “Pigs Is Pigs,” Dabice took a moment to address the crowd, and all but let everyone in the room join the band for a moment. She noted we’d all been isolated from one another for too long, had dealt with too much grief, and the world only seemed to be getting more insane every day. It was time for everyone to get it all out in one primal scream, together. Which we all did, yelling at the top of our lungs. And then Mannequin Pussy continued the set, as Dabice still had more to say.

“We just try to have a moment,” she says, “to all take a breath and recognize the fact that we’re probably all in this room together because we have that same thing inside of us that is just longing to be exorcised.”

Three years after that White Eagle show, on a dreary January afternoon, Dabice is sitting across from me, wearing a striped blue sweater and a Jackie Kennedy-style pillbox hat. The bar is blasting the seasonably incongruous Sublime, and we are drinking our sodas like a motherfucking riot. She mentions that her pro-vax edicts were not always warmly received, before ruminating on how the pandemic changed her, her band, and her audience, and how they’ve all kept changing since.

The most obvious change for Dabice and the band is the departure of founding member, guitarist Athanasios Paul. “One of the important things about slowing down and stopping was everyone taking stock of where they were at and what they wanted,” she says with a level of diplomacy that could get her hired at the U.N. “If you’re going about it in a half-hearted way, it’s just not going to work.”

It’s clear Dabice is far more enthused to talk about the newest member, guitarist Maxine Steen, whom she first met when she would come to the coffee shop Dabice worked at between tours. They began writing songs together, just for them. “We were instant buds,” Steen remembers in a full-band Zoom conversation. “We were cracking each other up. But Missy brought something that no one I’ve ever really worked with brought.” She joined Mannequin Pussy as a touring member during their 2021 return and was later promoted to full-time guitarist.

During said full-band Zoom interview a few days after our Brooklyn hang, Dabice says her extracurricular collaborations with Steen began to feel unfair to the rest of the band, as well as the rest of the world, as we all deserved to hear what they were getting up to. “I’ve always been so in awe of Maxine’s talent, and I thought it was, like, basically criminal that a lot of the songs that she wrote were not seeing the light of day, because in any given week this bitch is doing 10 brilliant things on her own that only a few people are going to get to see,” she says. “So this was, like, my chance to put Maxine on a stage where she belongs.”

While she made a new creative partnership, her final big post-pandemic change was that Dabice’s last romantic partnership ended when the pandemic did. A self-described “serial monogamist,” she’s been “in relationships constantly for the last 10 years, and I have never just carved out space for myself. I sacrificed things where I let my attention get taken away,” she says. “In a strange way, I kind of put myself through isolation again; the world opened back up, and I think I retreated very heavily in the last two years into myself.”

While we all went through an often painful collective isolation, in her self-imposed one, the first time she’s been actively single in a long time, she learned that “I love myself,” she says, smiling. “I am never really bored because I’m delighted by the things that I’m creating and doing with other people and that I love."

The thing Dabice is most proud of making with her loved ones is the new Mannequin Pussy album / Got Heaven, their second for Epitaph. It’s both their hardest-hitting album and their catchiest, as they can switch with ease from a relentless assault reminiscent of prime Bikini Kill to blissful pop hooks that Ben Gibbard would appreciate.

“Those two worlds have always existed simultaneously to each other, where we’ve always been people who just kind of write what feels good,” she says. “We’re not gonna throw away a song because it doesn’t have enough edge.”

Edge is not in short supply here, though, as they set out purposely to write a thoughtfully erogenous album, the sort of thing an increasingly isolated and anxious world could hopefully get down with. “There’s so many levels to the idea of horniness, and that’s what we try to achieve on this album,” says Regisford, singling out “Loud Bark” as a sign that they knew they’d achieved their goals. “It sounds like heavy breathing on the buildup, like the idea of yearning and longing." Admitting he’s shocked by how libidinal the song came out, it ended up being the true north for the rest of the album.

“We’re trying to find a place that felt raw and primal in a way,” he adds, “without losing ourselves.”

That said, Dabice wants to make it clear that the wistful, then devastating, closer “Split Me Open" is a metaphor. “I’m not playing dumb, like, ‘I didn’t think about the sexual connotation of that.’ I was really thinking more poetically of how desire makes you feel like your heart is splitting open, the way that you want to merge with another person, instead of the more assumed graphic nature of it,” she says. “I think sometimes I write something that I’m almost blissfully unaware of its sexual connotation. But sometimes I know exactly what I’m doing."

She might occasionally have a dirty mind, but she’s a softy at heart, as shown by the winsome indie pop ballad “Nothing Like.” It’s the sweetest song Mannequin Pussy have ever written, one she says was inspired by a YouTube supercut of Buffy and Angel from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and how their love threatened to endanger the world. It had been kicking around for a while until the band finally figured out where to take it. “It’s a very sugary, classic pop song until all of a sudden there’s, like, a breaking point" she says, “and it all kind of falls apart and feels like that darkness again. And I think that was kind of the key that was missing." (For the record, she’s more of a Spike Girlie.)

But she hasn’t gotten too soft, as evidenced by the title track and lead single, arguably the angriest song they’ve ever written, and one whose lyrics were finished in a Los Angeles Korean spa at night after they’d spent all day working with producer John Congleton. (They intentionally gave themselves a tight deadline to finish everything, to create a sense of urgency.)

“It’s the recognition that so many of the people in my life are basically targets of organized religion, where their whole existence has been made to be the villain of a story that the church wrote,” she says of the song. “This is where I get so in touch with my anger and my rage, where I’m like, ‘How fucking dare they make a group of people into villains so that they can prevent class consciousness?’ Which is really what it is.”

It’s not lost on her that her band is composed of cis women, a trans woman, and a Black man, and she’s lately taken to performing in stage attire, heavy on “mesh dresses and harnesses and pasties,” created by local designers that “if I was on the street, I would be continually harassed for." Just by being themselves, Mannequin Pussy make some people uncomfortable. Regisford says that performing “Pigs Is Pigs” is a chance to “acknowledge the brown people in the crowd," but there have been times when “a couple of bros go off when we’re trying to talk; they feel upset when we’re saying these things."

It’s not easy on the mind and heart to tour an America increasingly torn apart by culture wars. But it’s worth it when you consider, as dmmmer Kaleen Reading points out, that venues in small towns and red states are “not different than anywhere else to play a show.” There are always people who feel like outsiders trapped by their home’s regressive culture, and Mannequin Pussy want them to know they’re not alone.

After finishing up the album early last year, Mannequin Pussy toured relentlessly throughout the culture-war-crazed United States. And they did so as Steen was entering her second year of transitioning.

“It was an intense time for me,” she says. “Obviously there still is a lot of volatility; there was a lot going on politically that was pretty terrifying." She remembers that “I felt it at every gas station stop in the middle of, you know, Texas. Just aggressive, weird vibes from people. I’m just trying to go take a piss and grab a fucking water or something, but you sense it. You feel it."

Still, Steen backs her drummer’s point.

“People go hard in Florida. People go hard in Texas,” Steen notes of their crowds. “It does mean a lot to me that queer kids see that there is an avenue and that they’re okay.”

Regisford picks up on the thought, noting, “I always try to remind myself and even my peers within my bubble that there are queer people in Texas, right? There are trans people in Florida. All the people that you have in your city are in all the other parts of this country, too. And we can create a space for them to come to a show just to have fun,” he adds, “to know that there are other people who are just like them.”

abice has been refusing to shut up and put up with it since she was in second grade.

That’s when she learned that the park near her house was going to be bulldozed and turned into

a parking lot. “I was inconsolably upset, and my mom was very pragmatic and was like, ‘If this really affects you, you should write a letter to the editor.’ And I did, and I invited the mayor to come to my class to explain why they would get rid of a park.

“The mayor came and gave a presentation as to how they were going to reconfigure the park with parking for the growing downtown area,” she continues. “And that was also when I learned that other people are not going to care as much as you." She ran out of the room “in tears,” feeling like no one else “gave a shit,” but she learned a formative lesson nonetheless. “My mom has always been like, ‘If something is bothering you, try to find a way to make it better. Don’t just sit in your sadness.”’

I LODE MYSELF, DABICE SAYS, SIT1ILIMG “I AM HEUER REALLY BORED BECAUSE l*m DELIGHTED BY THE THINGS THAT I’m CREATING AND DOING WITH OTHER PEOPLE AND THAT I LODE.”

She singles out Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs as an inspiration (“such a monumental force in early2000s rock, which is when I was really coming of age”). But Dabice’s first rock-star aha moment, she claims, is Julia Stiles’ character Kat Stratford from the 1999 teenage comedy/Shakespeare riff 10 Things I Hate About You. “That was, like, the first example in the media of a young woman who was rejecting the things that were expected of her and so deeply wanting to make her own way in life. Her desire is so rooted in what she wants, she is just shunning all these expectations,” she says. “Even at that early age, I was realizing that some of the things that I was driven by and was interested in were not things that were expected of young women.”

When Dabice was 15, she was diagnosed with a cancerous tumor “right here,” she says, while pointing at her cheek. It was a very rare cancer, and “there had only been 300 cases of it in the world," she says. “The only thing that they knew about it was that it didn’t react at all to chemotherapy or radiation. So I did not have to go through [that], which is immensely lucky, especially for a young person, because that can lead to later illness. It had to be removed surgically.”

She would have to get MRI checkups for five years until she was declared cancer-free, “a limbo purgatory of not knowing if it’s going to resurface or not,” she says. That’s when her longer-simmering rebellious streak finally came bursting out, as she smoked her first cigarette a week after her initial diagnosis.

“I was just like, ‘My life is uncertain, I don’t know what the next two years will look like, so I want to experience life,”’ she says. “And I think, for a teenager growing up in suburbia, those experiences are getting as fucked up as possible. ‘I’m gonna smoke weed, I’m gonna smoke cigs, and I’m gonna maybe try mushrooms for the first time, and I’m gonna get blackout drunk. I’m just gonna try as hard as I can to live a life that feels like something.”’

Mannequin Pussy started in 2010, playing every DIY space in Philadelphia they could find, and released their self-titled debut in 2014. When Dabice listens to the album, “my heart breaks a little bit for young me,” she says. “I was just so desperate to feel something other than pain that I just found myself screaming all the time.” Her grandfather owned a record store in Baltimore, and her grandmother played accordion in a band with her sisters. But even though Dabice wanted to be in a band since she was 11, she didn’t seriously start making music until she had to move home to take care of her mother, who’d suffered a stroke from which she later recovered.

Being forced to sit still finally made her acknowledge and work through the trauma of her cancer diagnosis and “different toxic relationships and abuse,” she says. “When the brain goes through trauma, it has a way of just blocking it out. It tries to protect you by pretending that it didn’t happen. I think I was being so flooded by the reality that a lot of these things happened, that I was just in such immense emotional pain that then translated into physical pain."

Mannequin Pussy was her way of working through and releasing that pain, and it’s been a decade of ups and downs since. Their 2019 single “Drunk II” became a viral hit that she says “solidified" their audience after years of DIY touring, allowing her “jobby” to become a job. She was delighted that the audience that discovered the song stuck around. “Not everyone’s there because they’re waiting for 15 seconds of one song,” she says. They also had their songs performed by characters in the Kate Winslet-starring HBO limited series Mare of Easttown, an “artistically legitimizing” experience. (Speaking of Hollywood, Dabice is currently working on a screenplay about her teenage experiences called Blackout, which she describes as the anti-The Fault in Our Stars.)

Mannequin Pussy, as a band, have also had their share of difficult times. They had to deal with a bitter dispute with their former label Tiny Engines, which was accused of that age-old music industry practice of “creative accounting." (Dabice didn’t care to say much, other than noting that the band owns the masters to their early albums, which they rereleased on their own imprints.) And in 2021, in Akron, Ohio, Mannequin Pussy had their van and equipment stolen. They rented a new van and borrowed equipment, managing to not cancel a single show, “because we’re fucking legends."

I Got Heaven is a capstone to a tough but rewarding decade, and an announcement that Mannequin Pussy have become one of the most vital bands of their generation, one that Dabice hopes inspires people to live how they see fit. But she’s quick to note that “something that we’ve always really attached ourselves to in the dynamic of the group is that our best work is always lying ahead of us.”

She’s started Transcendental Meditation (she was inspired by David Lynch, and honestly, same) and has been making an effort to learn “how to live within this body the best that I possibly can.” She’s calmer and more collected than ever, a change that has eased a bit—a lifelong feeling of being “manically driven towards making music.”

But only a little bit. Dabice feels she’s already had to take too many pauses from her life to ever willingly slow down again. She’s lost too much time and can’t lose any more. “I don’t know if my health will change again in my life, but it certainly is a possibility,” she says. “You don’t get a taste for your own mortality at 15 years old without thinking you’re running out of time. And you respect the fact that this is all temporary. I think the mania comes from wanting to make things that I’m so proud of, that bring me closer to the people I love.

“While I still have the time.”