You know that feeling when you’re a teenager and you’ve been listening to Linkin Park and you hear punk rock for the first time and you feel like you have finally found your place in the world. You sell your Linkin Park, Limp Bizkit, Korn, and Slipknot CDs that you never really liked that much anyway at the Hastings down the street from your house and you proceed down the rabbit hole of this brand new world of angry young people and become an angry young person yourself. That is a lightning in a bottle feeling that you are only supposed to feel once in your life, and I felt it again in the opening minutes of Joyce Manor’s Never Hungover Again. That’s not me saying that Joyce Manor saved punk rock or anything like that, but there’s so much wild abandon in this masterfully brisk LP that it reminded me why I love this kind of music. Short, fast, loud, clever, catchy, and on repeat forever. It’s almost alchemical how replayable this album is. It never wears out, no song ever overstays its welcome. In a world of radio rock where the general MO is “repeat the chorus as many times you can in five-and-a-half minutes” (a model I have ranted on ad nauseum over the years), this is my kind of music. Though it would be easy to say Never Hungover Again was my most played album of the decade by virtue of its short runtime, I still listened to this album twice as much as the next closest contender. That doesn’t even take into account the fact that I didn’t get into this one until 2016, and I felt like I was making up for lost time. How had something so perfectly suited for my ear-holes evaded them for this long? How could I let something like this happen? How could I prevent something like this from happening again in the future? The white-hot love I feel for this record is so pure.
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