Raw Power: In Conversation with Pissed Jeans’ Matt Korvette

Pissed Jeans see the world through a vastly different lens to their punk-inspired peers. It’s what makes them true one-offs.

The band’s ability to remain ahead of the curve is down to their approach. Since the searing statement of their 2005 debut, Shallow (Parts Unknown), singer Matt Korvette, guitarist Brad Fry, bassist Randy Huth and drummer Sean McGuinness have embarked on a six-album reign oscillating between humour and ferocious denunciations, not limited to political leaders, the middle class, average joes, and even their own fans.

Active participants in the daily grind (Korvette still works as an insurance loss adjustor), parenthood and the new perspectives that particular facet of life brings, Pissed Jeans are a band built on existential growth. From Shallow to their Sub Pop oeuvre, each record feels vastly different from the last. This is a band of wise heads that knows what it takes to stay relevant, and in a modern age where culture has never been so disposable, well… that it itself feels punk.

Talking to Korvette over Zoom earlier this month, and whilst he is perhaps excited about the band’s new album Half Divorced more than any other Pissed Jeans release, at the end of our conversation we backtrack through the band’s past where I ask him to part with his first thought of each album.

Shallow: “Feeling like we were pretty young,” he offers.

Hope for Men: “Trying too hard. That might be my least favourite one,” admits Korvette, much to my surprise. “They’re all good, and some of them I really love. I feel like Hope for Men, we’re aware that we were young punk kids signing with a bigger label, and I think we wanted to make sure that no one thought we were selling out, which is a cute, antiquated thought at this time.”

King of Jeans: “New York. That’s where we recorded that one and feels like we really were aiming to our own there.”

Honeys: “Parenthood. We all became dads in the same year. I feel like we were really on the cusp of early parenthood when that one came out.”

Why Love Now: “I can’t help but think of Lydia Lunch, who produced it for us to some extent, and the joy of getting to become her friend and be in her presence… and also the horror and fear. She’s as real as it gets, and [I] feel very lucky to have worked with her.”

Half Divorced: “Great songs. I love listening to this record myself, that’s a win right there! We got some great songs that I want to hear.”

One of which is the raging cacophony of Junktime. “It’s definitely a little more colourful than other Pissed Jeans songs,” says Korvette. “It’s all stemming from some thought of reality. There was a butane tank that exploded in Philadelphia a couple of years ago, and it was massive. No one really knew how poisonous it was and were like, ‘Oh, are we safe to be breathing today?’ No one really seemed to have a good answer… and then we all just ignored it. That stuck out to me. Things are really fucking up, and no one seems to be giving it the attention it deserves.”

Half Divorced is Pissed Jeans’ unmistakable punk record. A host of straight, burning arrows that hit the bullseye every time.

While our conversation weaves in and out of the incessantly bleak political landscape, the rip-and-tear assault of opener, Killing All the Wrong People, feeds into these thoughts (“You want to be the cure / Better kill the infection,” snarls Korvette.

Pissed Jeans remain assuredly austere throughout, launching into the acerbic Anti-Sapio and (Stolen) Catalytic Convertor. Songs that see the band at their straight-shooting, cynical best, particularly on the latter (“Carbon monoxide humans / They’ll quietly hang around and eventually kill you”). On the emphatically bruising closing track Moving On, Korvette has seemingly had enough of this modern world, growing distant in the rear-vision mirror, running for the hills never to be seen again.

There’s the staple moments where humour and cynicism make for unique bedfellows. The blues punk hegemony of Helicopter Parent, and the sinister realities accentuated through Sixty-Two Thousands Dollars in Debt. Then there’s Everywhere is Bad as Korvette takes us on a world tour of horrors through one of Pissed Jeans funniest songs. It’s a band having fun.

With Fry’s lightning guitars, McGuinness thunderous drum rolls and Huth’s swampy bass weight, sonically the band hasn’t sounded so sharp and clinical. Cling to a Poisoned Dream sounds like a play on the best parts of the first Bronx album when they actually felt dangerous. And speaking of, Alive with Hate is Pissed Jeans simply at their most venomous. The same could be said of Half Divorced. An album where the band maintains a distinct talent for the truth.

Our conversation moves on to touring, and considering the band is well into its third decade, it’s surprising how many places they haven’t played. “Unless you’re willing to throw six weeks in the van together, it’s hard to get to Colorado Springs or Miami,” says Korvette. “We’ve never been to Denver, but we’re going there for the first time later this year, and we’re psyched for that.”

And that’s the big take out after speaking to the Pissed Jeans leader. There’s a new energy. Surprising considering a current client where established bands are seeing their fan bases grow older, the astronomical rise in living costs, and the state of politics where world leaders range from ineffective to just sheer dangerous. The flow-on effect paints a dark picture; however, Pissed Jeans know they can only control what’s in front of them. Their approach, as measured as ever.

“We don’t have any plans of stopping, so who knows what the future holds? As long as we’re alive and healthy enough to do it,” says Korvette.

Visual Space: In Conversation with Luggage’s Michael Vallera

Sun 13: On Everywhere Is Bad, there are a lot of places that you mention, but not Allentown. How important has it been to the Pissed Jeans story?

Matt Korvette: “You know how certain details become part of a story and they’re close to being accurate? Allentown is a very small city, and we grew up–three of us did– in a suburb. We grew up playing shows in Allentown, but really, we’ve been a Philadelphia band for 20 years now. I feel like Philadelphia feels like our true home. It’s the first town we mentioned in the song, and the suburb of Allentown where we’re from is called Nazareth, which also gets a shout out. It’s personal to us that we get the details right, but if somebody’s called us an Allentown band, that’s fine. No harm, no foul.”

S13: Sure.

MK: “It’s certainly where we started out playing shows. As far as how that plays into us, I feel like we still have a lot of close friendships with people from Allentown. For example, Arthur [Rizk], who produced our previous album, he’s from Allentown as well, although I guess he’s probably also from some other small town that isn’t Allentown, but close enough. Same basic geographic location.

“We definitely have the same old ties. We’ve been friends for longer than we were a band. It’s baked into us at this point. A lot of the people that we care about and work with and love.”

S13: Do you think that spending your formative years in a smaller town gives you a bit more headspace to form a clearer view on the overall aspects of life, rather than being caught up in the city bubble?

MK: “I feel like more than geographic, we were lucky to come about before everything was immediately slapped on the internet. We got to exist with our friends without the thought that other people would be noticing this. It was purely for our enjoyment and our close friends and the people that we lived near. There’s a freedom in that, you know? In that we’re not immediately being criticised and reviewed and copied by the rest of the world. It’s nice to have a scene that you can just develop slowly without any pressure, and that’s what we lucked out to have.

“For me, that is the biggest thing about us growing up. If we were around now, our first demo would be on Bandcamp, and who knows? Someone could be like, ‘You guys really suck’, and then we don’t go any further because people have already decided we’re no good. It’s nice to have that incubation time with your crew to work out what you want to be.”

S13: We’re probably a similar age where we grew up with the world before tech, and I find that people of our generation either really embrace it, or dismiss it altogether…

MK: “I don’t embrace it, but I also like can’t ignore it. I need to be comfortable with the level of use so that it doesn’t feel totally gross, you know?”

S13: For sure. The last song on Half Divorced is Moving On, where you sing, “Cheesing into my camera phone / Pretending that I’m not alone / Life’s the first thing that we all postpone.” It feels like you’ve nailed the mass culture psyche…

MK: “Yeah, that’s what we’re going for. It’s lonely. It’s isolating. No one’s having fun with it. That’s the thing that bugs me the most. It’d be one thing if people are out doing harmful drugs; at least they’re enjoying themselves! But we’re on our phones… no one’s even having fun, and we’re all still doing it anyway. (laughs) There’s not even any little benefit to this.”

S13: It does feel like culture is really sterilized, and it’s stemmed from this.

MK: “Yeah, the fact that we all have the internet on all the time is a real pain. If some 18-year-old kid in a suburb somewhere comes up with a wild new dance, it’s going to be stolen from them immediately. It’s just not the same, the way you get to own your own culture for a little bit when you’re underground and not blasted to the world to go viral.”

S13: Sonically it sounds like you guys are having fun, but lyrically it feels like watching Boiling Point! Can you tell us the process behind Half Divorced?

MK: “It’s funny. I want to sing about things that I feel strongly about. A good starting point for any punk song, I feel, is to truly throw out there what’s bothering me. I feel like making this record, we’re all probably in better headspaces than we’ve been in a while. It felt good to get this one out. I feel less frustrated or depressed than previous years. It’s just fun to dump it out there and not be extreme but be to feel as strongly about things as possible. If we’re only going to have so many songs, we might as well make them potent or strongest worded [in] trying to express a feeling.”

S13: As we get older and experience more life through a satirical and cynical lens, would it be fair to say that Pissed Jeans should be getting more cantankerous with each record?

MK: “I feel like the world is getting worse with each new record, right? So maybe it’s just a reflection of that. If suddenly, Americans had health care and there weren’t poor people being bombed all the time, maybe the tone of Pissed Jeans would change, but it feels like the world leaders are getting worse and stupider and more evil. Regular people are struggling more, especially where I live; it’s hard feel that. People are worse off now than they were 10 or 20 years ago.”

S13: In terms of your songwriting approach, can one song unlock something in your mind for another to form? For example, Sixty-Two Thousand Dollars in Debt and Everywhere is Bad feel like they are loosely tackling the same problems in terms of cost of living. Would one song exist without the other in that sense?

MK: “Yeah… I guess I never want to repeat myself; but also, I only have so many thoughts in my head. I’m sure some of them will be similar to others, like certain things that might stress me out. Money, for example, that can certainly show up through multiple songs, thinking about food (laughs), just random themes that pop up.

“But I feel like they’re pretty independent of each other. Everywhere is Bad is kind of silly, but it was fun to comment on how every place sucks. To me, there’s a comfort in that. It’s not like you’re missing out on a great place, because every place sucks! You’re not missing out because you don’t live in New York City, or Paris, or Hawaii. A buddy of mine heard the song and he’s like, ‘I love that you make fun of people who complain about everything’, and I was like, ‘Oh, I wasn’t doing that. I was just actually complaining about everything, but interesting interpretation’. It’s fun to hear what someone else can get from it. That’s always exciting when someone has a different take on what you’re doing.”

S13: Your observations are as sharp as ever, like the guy drinking along at the other end of the bar taking notes. Generally, does a song form quickly in your head?

MK: (Laughs) “Right. The way it works for me is we’ll work on the music and come up with new songs, just instrumentals. If we have something that we really like, I keep a running notepad of ideas that could be something that seems like it’d be a great song title, and then I’ll fill it out. Or an idea that needs to have a title, but I’ll look at my list once we have a new song and try to figure out what lyrics would fit with the vibe and atmosphere of the song.

“Sometimes it happens within two seconds, and it’s the simplest thing. There are other songs, like on this new record, that took us forever. You can’t count on it being either way, but I feel like the results can be just as good from spending nine months working on something and tinkering, than something that just came together in an afternoon.”

S13: The first song that jumped out at me was Helicopter Parent. It feels like that could have evolved pretty quickly…

MK: “Yeah, Brad wrote that one, as far as bringing the riff. He generally has more of a realised idea for what he wants out of the music. That did come together pretty easily.”

S13: The title Half Divorced got me thinking about one of your songs, Love Without Emotion. I feel like the two could be considered linked…

MK: “Love Without Emotion was more about feeling… unable to access my emotions. I think sometimes if you’re having really bad thoughts, you can get in your head and depress those bad thoughts, but then you have trouble accessing the rest of the range of emotions that we have. You can’t just pick one emotion to stuff under the table, it’s either all or nothing. That’s where I was coming from on that one.

“Half Divorced to me it was just more a feeling of existing in this world where it’s like, ‘Do you really want to have to comment on Taylor Swift? Do you really want to be Team Trump or Team Biden when they’re both terrible people?’ I don’t want to partake in the options that are being given to me as if I don’t have other choices.

“I’m talking very much what it feels like for me here in America. I feel like we’re given pathetic choices and told to really care about these things. Half Divorced was being like, ‘I want to be away from this, I want to worry about things that I think are important’. I don’t even want to hate on Taylor Swift, I just don’t want to have to be a part of that conversation or dialogue. I want to move elsewhere with where I put my time and passion. I feel like things are really shoved down our throats these days as far as the discourse that happens every day. It was just about being actively against that.”

S13: Things are so extreme these days where everybody is expected to have an opinion on everything. We all have choices, and everyone has an active choice not to participate in the debate, too.”

MK: “I think it’s a really powerful thing to shut up. (laughs) Just to make it worthwhile when you speak… to not feel that need to jump in with your two cents.”

S13: The protagonists in your songs have always wrestled with conflict, and Alive With Hate feels like one of the darkest songs you’ve written. Did this one come early on during the writing process?

MK: “We’d been working on that for a while. To me, it doesn’t feel as dark. It’s like a mantra or a goal to not be so filled with hate. Where I was coming from with that one is… if you see some Trump lover online say something stupid, there can be such an impulse to destroy them. To me, that’s such a futile impulse; nothing good comes of that. Hating some anonymous person… we need to move past that. All it does is drive up engagement for social media companies to make money and get clicks.

“I have no interest in that type of lifestyle of online fighting. I think we all know the feeling of saying something really mean to someone online, and that feels good for a split second, but then you also feel like an asshole… even if the other person deserved it. It’s not a way that I want to carry myself, and that’s just me talking to myself. If I truly care about someone having a terrible opinion, you have to find other ways, rather than yelling at them online.”

S13: Do you think as a society we’ve lost the ability to engage in debate and to try and find a middle ground to move forward?

MK: “Yeah, it’s certainly difficult because everything’s so polarised now. Everyone’s put into camps, and you’re completely in allegiance to whatever your team is no matter if there’s also stupid shit happening there. I really don’t like that. My approach is to try to work on myself as best as possible, because that’s something that I can change and hopefully lead by example. The people that are in my life witness me not fighting, not yelling, not being aggressive in these ways.

“If there’s people in my life that I feel have a different thought than me – that I want them to learn about a different position that I’m thinking of – I can have those conversations, but in a way that’s more personal, rather than, ‘Oh, here’s a Trump fan 18725, let me go tell ’em that their daughter’s ugly!’ What are you doing, people, you know?”

S13: That’s the one great aspect of Pissed Jeans. The punk and noise-rock scene can be considered very masculine, but you always seem to rise above that. For example, writing a song like Male Gaze, you seem to be always trying to work on yourselves to progress…

MK: “Yeah, for sure. To me, it’s more interesting, because it’s scarier and more vulnerable. There’s nothing easier than to be an asshole. I give props to GG Allin, or someone who really was living on the fringes, truly risking life and limb for whatever idiotic plans they had. But nowadays, just to be some sexist dipshit, there’s really nothing on the line there. It’s just not interesting to me. I’d rather see someone talking about being bald, or divorce, or parenting. These are things that truly feel taboo to me. You can’t really meet a stranger and say, ‘Oh, how’s your divorce?’ or [say], ‘Oh, you’re really going bald up there’. These are things you can’t say, so to me that’s more exciting to shine a little light on those things, rather than just be like, ‘Serial killers, murder, cool! Girls in bikinis, there’s a gun!’ Who cares? It’s just so played out.”

S13: Sonically, the band has built a foundation on being so visceral. Is there any sort of creative tension within the band, and if so, does it make it better?

MK: “The tension is that we don’t want to sound like a band that’s trying to sound like Pissed Jeans, and we don’t want to repeat ourselves. But we also don’t want to be like, ‘Now we’re synth wave, or a purely industrial noise band, or we’re just melodic punk!’ It all has to make sense as Pissed Jeans, it can’t be a full-on departure. And it’s tough because we keep writing albums, and our universe is growing, but it’s not exploding into new realms. So, it becomes trickier to write a good song that sounds truly like us that we haven’t written it before.

“I feel like we got into a really good groove with this last record. Maybe going a little faster, a little more aggressive and shorter. I feel like just when it’s four of us interpreting things, it’s going to sound like Pissed Jeans, so we’re lucky in that way. We have a wide range that we can dig into, because we just love so many types of music. There can be some surf song that Brad likes. Sean has some really unusual percussive elements that he wants to do. But then when we all bring it in, it just sounds like Pissed Jeans. It’s pretty nice.”

S13: In terms of your live performance, which again, I think this record will translate well live, do you remember every detail of a show, or as you take the stage is it more of an escapism?

S13: “I don’t remember everything. I feel like I would remember the bad shows the most vividly, like, ‘Ah, I remember that moment where everything broke [and] I was just standing there for five minutes’. We definitely lose ourselves a bit and just really have fun. We’ve been playing some of these songs live here and there, and it’s felt good. But of course, no one knows them. It’ll be exciting for people to have some familiarity with them, and because it does feel like a bunch of songs that were meant to be played live. This isn’t a moody studio affair based with atmosphere acts in production. The songs were all just ready to go and be played.”

S13: Speaking of that, Pissed Jeans aren’t in the two-year album / tour cycle and generally make records every four or five years. Do you think this attitude has helped maintain the longevity of the band?

MK: “Oh, for sure. By doing it as something that’s a lot of fun and a really serious hobby, rather than a profession… it just keeps it so fresh. We never feel the stress or obligation. Like, ‘Oh, I gotta go back to the Midwest for the third time this year because if I don’t, I won’t be able to afford groceries’. Not having that weighing on us is super liberating, so when we do go to play Chicago or Manchester, it’s like, ‘Wow! We haven’t been here in a while. This rules, let’s have some serious fun rather than this being part of our business strategy.’”

S13: In terms of the election, how do you see it going?

MK: “It’s hard to say. I feel like the outcome will ultimately not be very different, no matter who’s in charge of America, because it’s just such a terrible place run by money. If there was someone who was going to radically change things, they wouldn’t be allowed to run for president. America really finds a way of weeding out anyone that isn’t in service of corporate interests.

“I feel like all you can do is try to talk to other people. The more people that have their eyes fully open of what a farce it is, the better. Our only hope is that enough people are fed up, and from all sides. There are idiot Trump lovers who are getting screwed just as much as people who love Bernie Sanders. It’s just a matter of everyone having their awareness raised of what’s happening.”

“I was speaking with someone from Germany a couple of days ago, and he mentioned a friend of his who went to L.A., and they were stunned by the homelessness. I think Europeans don’t understand how bad homelessness can be in America; we’re just so numb to it. We’re such a rich country, and we do nothing about that. There are so many frustrating things that clearly aren’t priorities for our leaders, so I wouldn’t put my hope in any basket. They’re all cut from the same terrible cloth. If you’re a poor person in the Middle East, it doesn’t really matter to you if the American president is Obama or Trump, or Biden or Bush. You’re still getting blown to bits. It’s super fucked up.”

Half Divorced is out Friday via Sub Pop. Purchase from Bandcamp.