Pissed Jeans drummer Sean McGuinness | Photo by Rachel Del Sordo
Pissed Jeans doesn’t mess around with lots of small releases. Sure, so they put out Sam Kinison Woman/The L Word three years ago. They also had two other EPs before their first full-length, Shallow. But point being, everything they release gets a physical pressing. This band doesn’t pussyfoot around with Bandcamp pages and songs that are exclusively available online.
And sure, the Jeans haven’t released a new full-length record in four years. So what? The forthcoming Honeys is drenched in enough scuzzy distortion and stark, white-knuckled aggression that it almost feels as if it’s been pent up inside the foursome for way longer. Contrary to how it seems, they never took a break from writing. They’ve just been at this one for longer than you know.
“We’re obviously good at taking our sweet time,” Sean McGuinness, Pissed Jeans’ drummer, says over a beer on an incredibly frigid January afternoon. “It’s not necessarily with quality in mind, but there’s a certain vulnerability that comes with making music and showing that inner-creative side that you can tend to hold back or be bashful about.”
McGuinness goes on to say that they had began writing songs for Honeys shortly after 2009’s King of Jeans, but the music didn’t leave their practice space in McGuinness’ home for quite a while.
“We trust our instincts,” he says. “And we have a pedigree that we strive for. But that sounds too high-brow. We had an idea going into the new material that we wanted to be, not necessarily more upbeat, but a little more snappy and straightforward.”
Despite wanting to take some of the mud out of their sludgy post-hardcore, the record (released nationally tomorrow on Sub Pop) still has what McGuinness calls “classic Jeans.” And he’s right. There’s a certain swagger to Honeys that goes beyond punk rock attitude. With those fresh-yet-classic vibes, it stands up to the time they spent, drowns King of Jeans in urgency and proves that time doesn’t mean a thing to these teenage adults. Continue reading
Call it two and a half minutes of canned energy. Philly’s Pissed Jeans are getting set to release their latest LP, Honeys, and it’s a tremendous set of amped-up, MC5-style proto-punk overdrive. Today, they premiered a new track called “Cathouse,” which takes a feisty seat in the latter third of the record, which is 