PISSED JEANS - HALF DIVORCED

Released: 01/03/24

Whether in songs redolent of the melodic post-punk of Les Savy Fav, or, at their heaviest, the libidinous post-hardcore noise rock of The Jesus Lizard, the common denominator in all Pissed Jeans tracks is the giving of absolutely no fucks. Having given up on listening to their whiny collective superego a long time ago, the Pennsylvanian quartet are pure id rock – and not in a performative Iggy Pop way, who was always just as philosophical and bookish as peers David Bowie and Lou Reed (see The Idiot, named after the great Dostoevsky novel, among many other examples) but in a truly feral, unhinged way: watching a Pissed Jeans show at ATP many years ago, for example, I remember singer Matt Korvette pelting a glass beer bottle across the room, which just missed the head of my startled friend by a whisker …

Anyway, random acts of violence notwithstanding, Pissed Jeans deserve all of the praise that is regularly showered on them by aficionados of coruscatingly nihilistic punk rock (Dreamhouse among them), and with sixth studio album Half-Divorced they’ve never sounded better. Still as ferociously angry as they were a decade ago, and as darkly funny – “Call it a death drive but that ain’t fair / Drive implies I’m headed somewhere”, spits Korvette on ‘Seatbelt Alarm Silencer’ – as songwriters and musicians, Pissed Jeans have simply matured. It’s undoubtedly a descriptor they’d hate – and yet one more reason to love them.