What’s in a name? Philly’s Mannequin Pussy is back with its best album yet

When Mannequin Pussy played before a packed Free at Noon crowd at the World Cafe Live last month, the ferocious Philadelphia band’s eight-song set was made up entirely of songs from I Got Heaven, the Marisa Dabice-led group’s fourth album, which comes out today.

For pretty much everyone in the lunch hour crowd, the music was brand new. Which did not prove a hindrance as the band neatly pulled off its trademark feat of first seducing listeners with sweetness and then demanding attention with brute force.

“Much like life,” Dabice says, talking about the yin-yang of the band’s sound that’s grown more melodically enticing while maintaining the transgressive power of metal-edged punk.

Mannequin Pussy comprises Dabice, bassist Colins “Bear” Regisford, drummer Kaleen Reading, and Maxine Steen, who plays guitar and synths.

The musicians are all in their 30s, and would love to put day jobs behind them. Regisford and Steen both work for Philly moving companies, and Reading, who lives in West Chester, recently quit her job as a school safety officer and drum teacher.

Dabice has a side project called Rosie Thorne with Steen, who she met as a barista at the now-gone Rocket Cat Cafe in Fishtown. Now when the band isn’t touring, she works in film, directing videos for artists like Bartees Strange.

The touring band also includes guitarist Carolyn Haynes, who will be on board for a U.S. trek with fellow Philadelphians Soul-Glo that begins at Phantom Power in Millersville on April 4 and ends at Union Transfer on May 22-23. They’re also doing an in-store performance at Repo Records on South Street on March 6.

Haynes is a key addition in part because she frees up Dabice — the band’s chief songwriter, known as Missy to friends — to put down her guitar and cut loose as one of the most riveting stage performers in rock and roll.

At the WXPN-FM (88.5) Free at Noon show, that showmanship was vividly demonstrated on I Got Heaven’s “Loud Bark,” in which Dabice repeated “I got a loud bark, deep bite” as an expression of anger and desire with increasing intensity as the band surged into overdrive.

The walls shook, the crowd convulsed, and Dabice strutted across the stage. It was a riveting, uncommonly intense early afternoon rock show.

That song is one of several canine references on I Got Heaven, starting with the title track, a critique of the pervasive influence of organized religion in America. It begins with Dabice snarling, “I went and walked myself, like a dog without a leash.”

“When I put down my guitar and Carolyn would play parts I would normally play, we started calling it ‘Going off leash,’” Dabice says. “I was just like an untethered dog.”

I Got Heaven is Mannequin Pussy’s second album for the California punk label Epitaph and the first the band has left Philadelphia to make, recording in Los Angeles last year with producer John Congleton.

The album, Dabice says “is about solitude, and self-reckoning, and healing from all the things you’ve been through in your life.”

It’s their most compelling work, and comes at a pivotal juncture for the band that Dabice, who grew up in Westport, Conn., formed shortly before moving to Philadelphia in 2013. The band has toured steadily — surviving trials like the theft of their van and equipment in Akron, Ohio, in 2021.

And their notoriety has grown. This month, actor Kristen Stewart told Rolling Stone why she loves Mannequin Pussy. “They’ve got a real sultry and positive growl that is just like shoving our faces in the bush of being a woman — and I love them for that.”

Dabice’s move to Philadelphia was prompted by women in the Philly music scene she met while on tour playing bass with singer Colleen Green. That included Nicole Snyder and Rachel Gagliardi of the punk band Slutever and Michelle Zauner, who then led the band Little Big League.

“There weren’t that many women in the scene back then,” Dabice says. “It was a real testament to feminine energy when we met. Rachel and Nicole were like: ‘You need to live in Philly, Philly is where it is.’”

In 2013, Dabice and the band’s then-drummer Athanasios Paul played a show at the Rotunda in West Philly, and was sold. “We got paid $100, which was the most money we had ever made.”

By 2016′s Romantic — 11 songs that clock in at just over 17 minutes — both Reading and Regisford were in the band, which honed its skills in the DIY all-ages music scene. “You fail publicly,” Dabice says. “And you just keep going. As an artist, you always feel your best work is ahead of you.”

“Around that time, Philly was known as the Land of 1000 Basements,” Regisford recalls. “There were so many house venues.”

The band has outgrown that all-ages scene but rues the loss of creative spaces to gentrification. “F— every single developer and every single hedge fund company who’s buying up multiple properties and jacking up the rent on everybody and driving up property taxes” in Philly, Dabice says. “Doing so much damage.”

Mannequin Pussy signed to Epitaph for 2019′s Patience, recorded in Conshohocken with producer Will Yip. That album contained the sublime single “Drunk II,” which led to a left-field breakthrough.

In 2021, the Kate Winslet-starring HBO drama Mare of Easttown used the band’s songs for a fictional band, with actor Angourie Rice recording vocals with Yip.

“It gave us a little cultural and artistic legitimacy,” says Dabice. “And it was pretty great to see Kate Winslet in a scene with somebody with a Mannequin Pussy shirt on.”

When Dabice first came up with the band’s name, “I just thought it was a funny, brilliant name,” she says. “When you’re starting out, you’re looking for a way to carve out your little place in the vast space of all art and music.”

It can still cause difficulties.

“Some venues won’t put the name on the marquee,” says Steen. “OK, we’ll play somewhere else.” In the United Kingdom, where the band will tour this summer, “they have to say Mannequin P on the radio,” says Reading.

“Obscenity, as defined by the Supreme Court, is something that lacks artistic and cultural value,” Dabice says. “By that standard, Mannequin Pussy is not obscene because it is inherently artistic and cultural. So I think it’s a fun win anytime we’re entering a more uncensored place.”

Dabice is happy that Mannequin Pussy — which she suggests “might be the last great band name” — still has the power to provoke.

“Ultimately, that’s what good rock ‘n’ roll music does,” she says. “It gets people thinking. It inspires them to feel something, whether that’s disgust or delight doesn’t matter. What matters is they heard something that woke them up.”