’60 Minutes or less’ – the new podcast from Birthday Cake For Breakfast – returns with one for the noise-heads, our eleventh episode featuring a particularly enjoyable chat with Matt Korvette, choice shouter in head-wreckers Pissed Jeans!
Notorious noise punks with almost twenty years in the game, Pissed Jeans first melted this particular brain over a decade ago with a kooky video for the insanely catchy ‘False Jesii Part 2’, a song that is weirdly a go-to shower song for yours truly.
From their second album ‘King of Jeans’, released in 2009, they’ve since followed it up with another four full length records, their latest – ‘Half Divorced’ – released in March 2024 via notable tastemakers SubPop. An invigorating ear-assault, there are songs about helicopter parenting, massive personal debt and finding the cons in every inch of the universe.
A month after releasing ‘Half Divorced’, we sat down with vocalist Matt Korvette ahead off a sold out show at the Brudenell Social Club in Leeds to talk about their new album, sobriety, eating on the road and crossing the Canadian border when your band is called ‘Pissed Jeans’.
Tell your friends, tell your colleagues, piss your jeans – go nuts!
A handy Spotify player is embedded below, but you can find further ways to listen here.
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Tell you what – we love hearing from artists when things go right. We equally love hearing from artists when things go dreadfully wrong. A song that was a piece of piss, written in 20 minutes? Or years in the making and a bastard to write?
Whether it’s a song that came together through great duress or one that was smashed out in a short amount of time, we’re getting the lowdown from some of our favourites on the one song that they can’t stop thinking about – in their own words.
Randy Huth, bassist in Pennsylvania noise outfit Pissed Jeans, talks us through the track ‘Junktime’ from their new album ‘Half Divorced’(out now on Sub Pop Records). Take it away, Randy…
“‘Junktime‘ is a crusher, truly a stand out track on ‘Half Divorced‘. I don’t say this to take away from the other tracks on the album. Genuinely, my feelings are that this is the best music we’ve assembled as a band to date. That being said, this song is in its own lane. Sonically, lyrically… I’m not totally sure what to say other than that this particular track is fucking special.
There is a lot of bouncing ideas back and forth via text and email. The four of us are all creative people, unfortunately life is chaotic. Getting everyone in a room together at this stage of adulthood is no easy task. Sending riffs to the crew is a good way to get a jump on developing these ideas into actual songs.
Brad first introduced what would be ‘Junktime’ to the rest of the Jeans sometime in mid 2022. We referred to it as “The Slapback One” up until a few months before tracking. Brad had built the song up around this hypnotic, almost insectoid sounding guitar. He is really great at seeing the complete big picture of a tune. There is a lot of thought put into the length of a part, and how spacious and intentionally simple that part is. There is something compelling about the openness that really draws you in. Once you’re comfortable and consumed we are ready to give you an unexpected chop to the throat.
I initially struggled to find my footing with this one. The idea was that the meat of the first portion of ‘Junktime’ would be only guitar, vocals, and kick drum. It’s quite a long time to stand there holding my bass not using it. I fooled around a bit with some delay on the bass, I thought if I could match the tempo of Brad and Sean and use my bass as more of a percussive instrument it might be a nice layer. Ultimately it was too busy, and offered very little to the song, if anything it softened the blow of that throat chop.
It can be intimidating to rehearse a song that’s essentially the same chord 112 times. The best way to tackle a jam like ‘Junktime’ is by charting the song and breaking it up into sections. We put the song through the wringer, and after a lot of work the instrumental portion was complete. I can’t place exactly when we dove into this one in the studio, but we tore through it faster than anticipated. Brad took inspiration from guitarist Jim Campilongo for the end jam guitar solo. Campilongo does a lot of wild string manipulation during his solos. He might detune a string an entire octave mid ripping. It adds this tension, and it’s a bit of a mind fuck trying to compute what the hell is happening with the guitar.
Matt worked his ass off to get this song finished on his end. He had locked himself off in a spare room at the studio where he listened to the song and fine tuned the lyrics. This song was probably the only tune that didn’t have completed lyrics by the time of tracking. After a few hours with his head down he emerged ready to give the vocals a crack. We were floored. The lyrics and his delivery are top notch. I’m not ashamed to say I felt the tears swell when we heard his first pass. When Brad presented this song to the Jeans, it was just this kind of cool idea… but over time it grew into this really fucking powerful song… and we managed to capture it.“
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Almost a decade ago, Philly quartet Pissed Jeans released the unrelenting ‘False Jesii Part 2′ from their ‘King of Jeans’ LP, a macho man chug-a-thon that howls along at pace in all its nonchalant mundanity.
Cut to 2017 and they’re still putting out uncomfortably good records (hello ‘Why Love Now’), but let’s look back to 2009 and bask in the banal nature of the raging False Jesii Part 2.
Could there be any other ‘Dick Straightener Of The Week’?
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Following on from our Top 50 songs of 2K17 earlier this year (which you can view here, here, here, here and… here), we decided to have a look back throughout the year to put together another Top 50 tracks that we’ve been salivating over. Don’t say we don’t spoil you.
From their forthcoming record ‘Microshift’, out early next year, Hookworms deliver a whirlwind of emotions on ‘Negative Space’. Very much the definition of taking the listener on a journey, from dance-a-thon beginnings, it builds to true euphoria (and so much more). Strap yourself in – we’ll see you on t’other side.
Field Music – ‘Count It Up’ (Open Here, Memphis Industries)
Goose pimple inducing stuff, the irresistible new single from Sunderland’s own Field Music is said to be their version of ‘Material Girl’, but with a more hard-hitting, Brexit lyrical theme attached.
Taken from her debut release (as premiered on these pages), Leeds based solo electronic artist NALA has lofty ambitions to be the ‘Unofficial Queen of music that makes you wanna dance and cry at the same time’. NALA excels in the thrilling ‘Limón’.
Pissed Jeans – ‘I’m A Man’ (Why Love Now, Sub Pop Records)
An uncomfortable yet invigorating listen, guest vocalist Lindsay Hunter dominates this crude, personal-space-invasion. On first listen, I was stunned into silence, jaw on the floor. ‘I’m A Man’ gets all up inside you and it’s fucking horrible, but it sees Pissed Jeans go above and beyond their already high status.
Yes, there was some trepidation in the LCD Soundsystem return (especially after the reveal of that dreadful artwork). These fears were soon nixed however once ‘American Dream’ dropped and the opening pangs of ‘oh baby’ kicked in. A heart-stopper no doubt.
The title track from the stunning new Everything Everything LP, ’A Fever Dream’ builds and builds to this luscious electronic track that is spine-tingling. The definite highlight from an album’s worth of stunners.
More saxophone please, mate! Super dancey brilliance from Leeds post-punk heartthrobs ZoZo, this giant single from their new EP and its mile-a-minute vocal is stupidly catchy. Absolute earworm central.
Protomartyr – ‘My Children’ (Relatives In Descent, Domino)
A thrilling cut from their latest album ‘Relatives In Descent’, this 100% ripper from Detroit post-punk outfit Protomartyr easily slots in as one of our favourites this year. Love that empowered vocal of frontman Joe Casey against that nails bass chug of Scott Davidson and jangling, spaghetti western guitar work from Greg Ahee.
Another Queens Of The Stone Age album opener, another solid gold banger. There were some reservations when initial single ‘The Way You Used To Do’ was released, but this groovy stomper is up there with some of QOTSA’s finest.
Real Terms – ‘Lake Trasimene’ (Superstar Destroyer)
Real Terms will forever hold a special place in our heart, given its three members made up the bulk of the incredible Vasco Da Gama. On this gorgeous cut, the trio bring out some serious chilled jams, with a magic vocal from frontman John Crawford.
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If you can Adam-and-believe-it, 2017 is almost a distant memory. We’re flying through the year as the world crumbles to bits. Thank Christ then that there’s been some good music on our journey into destruction!
Over the past 24 hours, we’ve been painstakingly choosing our favourite singles of the year and after much consideration, here’s our TOP 50 OF 2K17 (but it’s not in order, obviously…)
The return single from this Northern powerhouse, the infectious ‘Can’t Do’ is taken from their forthcoming album ‘A Fever Dream’, likely to have you jumping for joy on its release this August. Talk about not missing a beat, the hype train keeps roaring on!
One of the big hitters on an LP made up of big hitters, it’s the first appearance from Dutch Uncles in our list but I can promise you it won’t be their last. A ludicrous little number tucked away toward the end of latest album ‘Big Balloon’, its sultry tone is truly hypnotising!
Pissed Jeans – ‘The Bar Is Low’ (Why Love Now, Sub Pop Records)
Technically released in 2016, this rough and ready lead single from their 2017 release ‘Why Love Now’ is a proper shin kicker, sneering that we’re well and truly fighting for scraps right now. Cherry on top? This piss-funny promotional music video that catches our lads jock-ing it up in the gym.
The lead single from their latest record, ‘Maybe We’ll Drown’ captures the fuzzed out nature of the Leeds quintet perfectly, topped off with the spine-tinglingvocal of Liza Violet.
Check out our exclusive interview with Menace Beach here!
What a year it’s been for our Sleaford Mods. Giant showings at Wembley and Glastonbury Festival over the past month as well as shows all over the world have seen the duo getting in the face of all and sundry. Their latest record ‘English Tapas’ kick started the year for them and ‘Moptop’ sees them at their piss-funny, infectious best.
Acerbic and side-splittingly funny all at once, ‘Stendhal Syndrome’ takes shots at Rothko (paints like a child), Bellingham (shite photographer) and Francis Bacon (fucking div) against a frantic wig-splitting noise assault.
Meat Wave – ‘Bad Man’ (The Incessant, Big Scary Monsters/SideOneDummy Records)
Chicago’s gnarliest trio Meat Wave put out a real stormer of a record in ‘The Incessant’ earlier this year, with ‘Bad Man’ capturing the ferocity perfectly. We were slightly late to the party with Meat Wave, but we’re fully on board now.
Oh Sees – ‘The Static God’ (Orc, Castleface Records)
Taken from their 19th album out later this year (!), Oh Sees don’t just hit the ground running, they obliterate the ground and everything underneath it – Think that stadium scene from ‘Akira’(as you’ll find out as soon as you click play). Always hit, never miss.
Thundercat – ‘Show You The Way’ (Drunk, Brainfeeder)
From his most recent 20+ track LP Drunk, Thundercat brings the silky smooth vibez to this collaborative work of genius. FFO’s: Alan’s Deep Bath.
The lead single from a four-track EP released earlier this year, Cate Le Bon amps up the kookiness in this delightful little segway from 2016’s ‘Crab Day’ LP. The sixties vibe is strong in this one.
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I frown upon the idea of using a press release as a starting point for an album review – but since when am I going to let some jumped up two-bit music critic tell me what to do eh? In the first paragraph of Sub Pop’s blurb for ‘Why Love Now’ (the fifth album from the Pennsylvanian punk-rock four-piece Pissed Jeans), the band are described as a “male-fronted quartet”, immediately drawing my attention to the fact that the term ‘female-fronted’ is so often used to lamely summarize acts with women holding it down on the mic. So here’s a mind prod for you, I posit that Pissed Jeans are a feminist band. You just can’t argue with that (I mean you could try but if you’re gonna @me combat me!) Their whole shtick is about openly discussing the traps and pitfalls of being a man in the 21st century. Of course, this is expected from a punk-rock band as pertinent to our times as Pissed Jeans, but the main theme of this album in particular appears to be very specific to the subject of masculinity, more so than in their previous material. Advertently deconstructing their own masculine identities makes them contributors to feminist oral literature, the experience of being a man – carving out the grotesque parameters of manhood with razor sharp sardonic wit, laying waste to male pride, exposing boneheads for flaccid willies. Why Love Now ejaculates the zeitgeist right onto the table.
Even the riffs on this album have found their sound drenched in a bit of 80’s sleaze, as the band come the closest to sounding like AC/DC and Motorhead yet. But unlike their amp-wrecking forefathers, their matters are in order to reflect their wrongs rather than to glorify their privileges (compare ‘I’m A Man’ to Black Flag’s morally reprehensible ‘Slip It In’ and you get the picture). Though Pissed Jeans work isn’t to have an overbearing moralising purpose, it’s simply to say “This shit is ugly, why are we still doing this?”
Why Love Now is brought into the world literally kicking and screaming, as the grinding angst ridden growl-fest of ‘Waiting On My Horrible Warning’ wails of fear for what might be happening to your body on the inside, the creeping realisation of mortality as the world exhales you out into your thirties. This is far from the usual punk opener and there’s even acknowledgement of that, as the now (I’m imaging) red boiling face of Matt Korvette roars “everyday I used to play punk but now i’m just singing the blues”. In taking this entrance it cuts deeper than any d-beat could, even the choice of bleeping out a “fuck” adds to the bubbling pain. It feels too easy to call it a work of genius so early on, but if I can’t call a spade a trowel then I’m done with this here business.
‘The Bar Is Low’ is a swaggering pop anthem about the impenetrable haar of mediocrity, a society in which men who are rapists (Bill Cosby, Donald Trump), racists (Nigel Farage, Donald Trump), and essentially lacking in any intelligence whatsoever (Boris Johnson, Donald Trump) can still be at the top. It’s an idea that permeates through everything, to paraphrase Korvette in a recent interview with Sub Pop, “as a woman how far are you willing to go to choose a presidential candidate if it means giving up your rights as a woman?” Have we gone so far down this miserable road that this is all we can ask for? The phenomenal women’s protests around the world last month may mark a turning point, but I see this kind of sup-par attitude everywhere. From people’s aspirations for a socially equitable future, to expectations on dating sites. How many times have you read “I’m interested in anyone who isn’t an arse-hole”? The bar is indeed down the proverbial fucking toilet, and James Cameron sure as hell ain’t gonna pick it up.
J.G. Ballard meets Charlie Brooker as ‘Ignorecam’ presents the notion of deriving sexual pleasure from being ignored by a woman on the other end of a sex-cam, a grueling twist on 21st century loneliness and hyper-social perversion, while ‘Cold Whip Cream’ goes deep, and may be (if I’m not mistaken) the first punk song about pegging “…so speak up and have no shame, ‘cause you’ve got the pressures of being straight… you’re wondering what it’s like on the other end, but you’re worried she won’t bend”. Masculinity holds on by the thinnest of grey pubes in this brutally open tour of contemporary sexuality, rammed with more innuendos than you could fit in your en… *ahem*… Don’t worry though, Matthew says relax, as a “universe waits behind that door”.
‘Love Without Emotion’ is a stranger amongst the crowd. Dressed in uncanny 80’s nostalgia via Bradley Fry’s chorus effected guitars and the Billy Idolized hook, giving us what we wanted like Stranger Things and San Junipero did last year. But similarly to the latter, the question stands: is it real or just an empty box picked from the shelf? Aesthetic over something deeper? Love without emotion? A recurring theme of Pissed Jeans is the inability to engage emotionally and have the purity of an honest connection with other people, breaking through that glass door of cynicism and misanthropy. And it’s the belief that this is an essentialized trait of maleness which is the cause of both catastrophic suicide rates amongst men, as well as horrifying domestic violence and femicide statistics. Sorry, I got a bit serious for a second there, but it’s a reality I wouldn’t be able to confront without the art of Pissed Jeans, which brings me to the highlight of the album…
In a 2014 interview with The Fanzine, Lindsay Hunter – author of ‘Ugly Girls’, cited Pissed Jeans’ ‘False Jesii Part 2’ as a major influence for her critically acclaimed novel. Since then she has become good friends with the band and was asked to write some material for Why Love Now. The result is a stunning and vivid audio tirade of unapologetically lustful and cartoonish sexual declarations, cut with the trenchantly crude wit of Redd Fox and boot stamped with the boldness of a Rudy Ray Moore – had he been raised in a trailer park that is. “Me, I’m your boss/ make me a coffee and dip your undies in it, ‘cause I like me coffee with a nip of cream”. Hunter’s harassing character appears as a hyper-real entity, with an inflated sense of male sexual superiority and privilege, but I’m sure if you had a root around your office you’d find at least a dozen of these wankers. The primal rhythms stir up ferocious amounts of libidinal energy, a perfect accompaniment to the spoken word track, compressed within an inch of it’s life – putting it at risk of an immediate restraining order.
It’s worth mentioning the success of the production work from the legendary Lydia Lunch and Arthur Rizk, who manage to make Pissed Jeans distinguished brand of rock spike through the extremities of heavy hardcore and noise. Apparently Lunch threatened to “bend” the band “over the bathtub”, whatever that means? Seems to have worked wonders in producing such a gut-wrenchingly psychotic punk expulsion though.
Rizk’s influence is most clear in the metal moments of ‘It’s Your Knees’ with it’s exquisite downtuned power riff. A song about unnecessary male commentary on why one would want to fuck a girl (It’s all in the knees apparently). ‘Worldwide Marine Asset Financial Analyst’ sounds as absurd as it reads, tearing through with a tornado guitar solo and clocking in at just 1 minute 27 seconds, while ‘Have You Ever Been Furniture’ bemoans the pain of having low-self esteem.
Why Love Now oozes and throbs with sexual confusion and disappointment. It reeks of cum, sweat and aspirin but carries the intellect of a well read poet who views life’s shit stains to be as rich and as colourful as rainbows. When I can relate to a band as much as I do with Pissed Jeans, it’s like the world suddenly clicks into place and my understanding of my body can flow freely like the blood in my veins. It’s a harmonious state drawn from a chaotic mess. The feeling is often so direct that it tickles me and I find myself laughing, as if I have become intoxicated. Even when listening to the music alone it’s like I’ve found a best friend to share my existential pain with. It’s therapy is what it is.
Much like a successful sitcom about dysfunctionality – over the course of the past decade, Pissed Jeans’ whole output has been consistent and reliable while growing in strength. Somewhat like Bukowski and his attachment to so called “low culture”, Pissed Jeans deliver hardcore truths and scream about the shock of the mundane; all transcribed with the overhanging stench of beer burps popped through gritted teeth, looming like a morning fog loitering above the top lip. Their play is on the farcical nature of humanity, stripped nude on stage, coying and crapping itself with the dumbest of smiles. You wanted to know “how low can punk get?” well, Pissed Jeans said ‘Let me take you down there. Bring a pair of wellies’.
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