Tours were cancelled and everyone’s daily life came to an abrupt halt. With time on their hands and months spent apart Mannequin Pussy, made up of singer/guitarist Missy, bass player Colins “Bear” Regisford and drummer Kaleen Reading, decided to meet up in person, book some studio time and work on new material together. The resulting collection of songs is Perfect, out now via Epitaph Records. The EP only clocks in at just over 13 minutes but the group milks every ounce of blood and tears shed over the last year into every single second of its running time.

Kicking off with “Control” and Missy’s plaintive vocal melodies and muted guitar playing before everything builds into an explosive and cathartic eruption. It seems that their time apart from each other has made them even more of a powerful unit than they had been previously. The frustration of the year away from shows, family and friends seeps into the lyrical content of the EP’s title track. On “Perfect”, Missy sings, “Look in my eyes/Tell me I’m it/Tell me I’m beauty/Tell me I’m fit/Laugh at my face/Spit on my tits/Tell me I’m perfect/Tell me I’m it” and she condenses the heightened feeling of seeing a full year of other people’s curated lives on social media. A thing that seems even more absurd when you consider 2020 a time when most of us were feeling our worst. The song is a pummelling two minute blast of catharsis, helping to exorcise the pent up emotions associated with the year that was. Mannequin Pussy aren’t all bluster though. On “Darling” the band slows things down considerably. They manage to wring as much pathos out of the track, with just vocals and guitar, than they do with the full band blasting off into the stratosphere.

Mannequin Pussy is one of the rare acts that can make you feel the catharsis you would imagine that they must feel performing together. The way they are able to do this with a whisper or a scream sets them apart from the majority of heavy guitar based groups that would consider Mannequin Pussy their contemporaries. With the last year being so hard in so many ways, one of the things we could hold onto is that we were all going through it together and now with things hopefully starting to stabilize, it is good to have Mannequin Pussy back to help us reorient and heal.

Order Perfect by Mannequin Pussy HERE