PISSED JEANS ANNOUNCE NEW ALBUM, HALF DIVORCED
TO BE RELEASED VIA SUB POP ON 1ST MARCH
WATCH VIDEOS FOR “MOVING ON” AND “CLING TO A POISONED DREAM“
On 1st March 2024, Pissed Jeans will release Half Divorced, their incredible sixth album, on CD/LP/DSPs worldwide from Sub Pop. The band shared the official video for indelible lead single “Moving On” from director and frequent collaborator Joe Stakun (“The Bar Is Low,” “Bathroom Laughter,” “Romanticize Me”).
Pissed Jeans also shares “Sixty-Two Thousand Dollars in Debt,” a crushing new track about the heady excitement of shrinking debt-to-credit ratios, and a highlight from their forthcoming album Half Divorced.
And as a final pre release preview of the album, check out the Joe Stakun-directed official video for “Cling to a Poisoned Dream,” a bruising meditation of harsh truths, and a highlight from their excellent sixth album Half Divorced, out March 1st, worldwide on Sub Pop.
Pissed Jeans’ Half Divorced is the follow-up to 2017’s Why Love Now, an album that took aim at the mundane discomforts of modern life. The album and its singles received praise from The New York Times, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, The Guardian, Uncut, Stereogum, and more.
The twelve songs of Half Divorced skewer the tension between youthful optimism and the sobering realities of adulthood. Pissed Jeans’ – Matt Korvette (vocals), Bradley Fry (guitar), Randy Huth (bass), and Sean McGuinness (drums) – notorious acerbic sense of humor remains sharper than ever as they dismember some of the joys that contemporary adult life has to offer.
Half Divorced includes the previously mentioned “Moving On,” the omnidirectional piss-take “Everywhere Is Bad” (Spoiler alert: “Seattle is soaking wet”), shrinking debt-to-credit ratios in the bracing “Sixty-Two Thousand Dollars in Debt,” and the harsh truth-telling in the bruising “Cling to a Poisoned Dream.”
Half Divorced was produced and mixed by Pissed Jeans and Don Godwin and engineered by Mike Petillo at Tonal Park in Takoma Park, Maryland, and mastered by Arthur Rizk (co-producer and mixer for Why Love Now).
Pissed Jeans’ previously announced international tour dates in support of Half Divorced span end of February to April. New shows include Friday, 29th March 29th in Schijndel, NL at the Paaspop Festival. Additional live dates will be announced soon.
Thu, Feb 29 Mississippi Studios, Portland, OR Tickets
Fri. Mar. 01 – Seattle, WA – Madame Lou’s Tickets
Sat. Mar. 02 – Los Angeles, CA – The Echo Tickets
Fri. Mar. 15 – Philadelphia, PA – Underground Arts
Sat. Mar. 16 – Brooklyn, NY – St. Vitus
Fri, 29th March – Schijndel, NL – Paaspop Festival
Sat, 30th March – EartH (AKA Hackney Arts Centre), London, United Kingdom Tickets
Sun, 31st Mar – Manchester Punk Festival, Manchester, United Kingdom Tickets
Tue, 2nd Apr – Stereo, Glasgow, United Kingdom Tickets
Wed, 3rd Apr – Whelan’s, Dublin 2, Ireland Tickets
Thu, 4th Apr – Brudenell Social Club, Leeds, United Kingdom Tickets
Half Divorced is available to preorder now from Sub Pop.
Preorders in North America from megamart.subpop.com and select independent retailers will receive the limited Loser Edition on Spotify-Coloured vinyl (otherwise known as an opaque lime green…). In the UK and Europe, LP orders from independent retail stores will receive the Loser Edition on Coke Bottle Green vinyl. A UK-only Magenta vinyl edition will also be available to preorder through Mega Mart 2 (the new, UK-based sibling site to the world-famous Sub Pop Mega Mart) and Rough Trade Shops. All coloured vinyl versions are available while stock lasts.
HALF DIVORCED TRACK LISTING:
1 – KILLING ALL THE WRONG PEOPLE
2 – ANTI-SAPIO
3 – HELICOPTER PARENT
5 – SIXTY-TWO THOUSAND DOLLARS IN DEBT
6 – EVERYWHERE IS BAD
7 – JUNKTIME
8 – ALIVE WITH HATE
9 – SEATBELT ALARM SILENCER
10 – (STOLEN) CATALYTIC CONVERTER
11 – MONSTERS
12 – MOVING ON
More on Pissed Jeans’ Half Divorced by Chelsea Hodson
Pissed Jeans has never been a band that goes halfway—they’re known for their feral vocals, biting lyrics, buzzsaw guitars, and unhinged live shows, and their sixth album, Half Divorced is no exception. These songs skewer the tension between youthful optimism and the sobering realities of adulthood, and when viewed through frontman Matt Korvette’s scowl, everything takes on a level of violent absurdity.
Pissed Jeans’ notorious acerbic sense of humor remains sharper than ever as they dismember some of the joys that contemporary adult life has to offer, from helicopter parents to stolen catalytic converters to being $62,000 in debt. On “Seatbelt Alarm Silencer,” Korvette growls, “Call it a death drive but that ain’t fair / Drive implies I’m headed somewhere.”
So where does a band like Pissed Jeans go after nearly twenty years of making music, after becoming fathers, after marriages, and after divorces? Existence has festered to a boiling point. Korvette said, “Half Divorced has an aggression within it, in terms of saying, I don’t want this reality. There’s a power in being able to say, I realize you want me to pay attention to these things, but I’m telling you that they don’t matter. I’m already looking elsewhere.”
Even within the brutality that Korvette conjures on songs like “Killing All the Wrong People” (“If violence is now their form of play / Let’s aim em towards those who made em that way”), the energy on some of these songs is inadvertently, well, fun. Listening to this album will give even the most jaded nine-to-fiver the sense that unrestrained freedom is still possible. And who else is going to rhyme “colonizer” with “moisturizer” anyway?
Korvette, Brad Fry (guitar), Randy Huth (bass) and Sean McGuinness (drums) weren’t in any rush to finish Half Divorced, which was recorded by Don Godwin at Tonal Park in Takoma Park, Maryland. “We’re not the kind of band that bangs out a new record every two years,” Korvette said. “Pissed Jeans is truly like an art project for us, which is what makes it so fun.” This lack of restraint rages within the songs that unexpectedly veer into classic hardcore punk territory—often coming in at under two minutes long and erupting like the “butane tank explosion” Korvette sings about in “Junktime.”
This distilled energy makes Half Divorced sound menacing and dangerous. Korvette said, “We realized we’d never really fucked with pop punk, and we thought, this is something that isn’t going to be immediately recognizable as cool. So let’s challenge ourselves to make it feel cool to us.”
There’s also a Pink Lincolns cover, “Monsters,” on which Korvette sings, “People are more hideous than monsters.” And in the last song, “Moving On,” Korvette sneers, “Cheesing into my cameraphone / Pretending that I’m not alone / Life’s the first thing that we all postpone.” One gets the sense that Pissed Jeans refuses to “postpone” life in quite the same way – life, like art, is something that happens now, not later.
The word “divorce” falls in line with the moments of humiliation and shame that are held up for all to see on this album. Korvette said, “If you say something enough or if you just allow it to exist publicly, then it loses its evil monster-in-the-closet thing.” There is clarity to be found within both the light and the dark, in both the marriage and the divorce. As the chorus of the last song calls out: “I’m moving on, I’m moving on, I’m moving on.”