"Time Goes By So Slowly" - Joyce Manor, live at Electric Ballroom, London (October 2026)

By the third song of Joyce Manor’s headline performance at London’s Electric Ballroom, singer-guitarist Barry Johnson was already pointing his microphone towards us.

For the a cappella penultimate chorus of ‘I Know Where Mark Chen Lives’, the sold-out crowd at the 1,500-capacity venue enthusiastically took over. The song had only been released in January, but everyone seemed to know the words like we’d been sitting on the information for years.

Almost as quickly as the music had fallen away, it revved up again.

Welcome to Joyce Manor time.

The Californian pop-punk band made 63 minutes disappear at the Camden club, cramming 24 songs into one gloriously breathless sprint. It was my first Joyce Manor gig, and no amount of familiarity with their records had quite prepared me for experiencing that pace in person.

Joyce Manor performing 'I Know Where Mark Chen Lives', live at Electric Ballroom, London (October 2026)

Raised on a diet of Blink-182 and other turn-of-the-millennium pop-punk, I was somewhat surprised to have only truly discovered Joyce Manor in early 2024. Hearing Johnson’s distinctive baritone bray cutting through the mix reminded me of Blink’s co-vocalist Mark Hoppus, especially in a genre often associated with higher, more nasal voices.

I soon fell for these experts of epic economy, who have the ability to squeeze irresistible hooks into songs often lucky to reach two verses and two choruses (kind of like Guided By Voices, minus the lo-fi murk). Their seventh album, 2026’s I Used To Go To This Bar, was the first I’ve anticipated as an existing fan rather than explored retrospectively.

It’s become one of my favourites this year. Nine tracks in barely 19 minutes, yet the record comfortably wears several musical hats, moving between punk, indie rock, alt-country, and Nineties pop-rock without compromising the band’s commitment to conciseness. At home, that brevity was easy to overlook while cleaning the house or doing other chores. In the crowd, the rapid succession of those same songs seemed to upend the usual concert dynamic, where live versions often get to stretch their legs.

The evening’s setlist drew six songs from the latest album, and fans welcomed the newer material with as much enthusiasm as old favourites like ‘Heart Tattoo’, a classic from 2014’s Never Hungover Again that seems unlikely ever to be removed from Joyce Manor’s live repertoire. It’s one thing to remember a chorus, yet we even sang along to the guitar riff of ‘Grey Guitar’, vocalising the melody in the ‘da-da-da’ fashion of ‘Seven Nation Army’ by The White Stripes.

There were some rather more literal hats involved, too.

Drummer Jared Shavelson had apparently picked up a collection of bright green cowboy hats at Camden Market earlier that day, and Johnson donned one for the opening of ‘I Used To Go To This Bar’.

He soon tried to frisbee it into the audience but fell woefully short, nearly landing it on a security guard’s head. The guard retrieved it, briefly popped it on for a laugh, and handed the hat to a fan at the barrier, all while Johnson struggled to suppress a chuckle through the first verse.

So understated

Joyce Manor currently tours as a five-piece, with the core trio of co-founders Johnson and lead guitarist Chase Knobbe, plus longtime bassist Matt Ebert. Drummer Shavelson and multi-instrumentalist Neil Berthier join them as touring members.

Onstage, Berthier helps recreate the additional guitar, keyboard, and backing-vocal textures heard on the studio recordings, switching between acoustic and electric instruments as needed. The quieter opening and conclusion of ‘Last You Heard of Me’, from 2016’s Cody, made me particularly aware of his acoustic playing.

As a touring member, he wasn’t there to steal the spotlight, but to fill out arrangements with textures you might only notice if they were absent. The songs weren’t necessarily longer, but they sounded every bit as full live as they did through my earphones.

Johnson followed with an introduction to ‘NBTSA’ (short for ‘Never Be The Same Again’), from 2022’s 40 oz. To Fresno.

“This next song is about being abducted by aliens,” he announced, then recalled growing up wanting extraterrestrials to take him away, eventually describing it as “my attempt at writing ‘Aliens Exist’”.

Johnson didn’t even need to name Blink-182. As a decades-long Blink fan, I recognised the connection immediately, a satisfying confirmation of the musical kinship I’d heard since discovering Joyce Manor. That 1999 Blink song has since acquired an unexpected afterlife through Tom DeLonge’s long-held UFO obsession: in 2020, the Pentagon formally released US Navy footage previously publicised by his To The Stars Academy.

Knobbe’s guitar playing offered another reference point. Calm and controlled onstage, he favoured crisp, distinctive guitar figures over the thrashier tendencies of punk, occasionally reminding me of The Smiths’ Johnny Marr. A particularly beautiful lick during ‘Big Lie’ demonstrated how much personality he could inject without unnecessary flashiness.

There’s some method behind that clarity. Working with Bad Religion guitarist and Epitaph Records founder Brett Gurewitz, the band reduced distortion and avoided simply doubling their rhythm guitar parts on I Used To Go To This Bar, allowing individual melodies to weave around one another rather than disappear into a wall of sound.

Time and space have come unstuck

‘Well, Don’t It Seem Like You’ve Been Here Before?’ revives one of Joyce Manor’s earliest folk-punk compositions for their latest album. The live arrangement also produced one of the evening’s most endearing musical malfunctions.

To close out the track, Knobbe dispensed with his trusty guitar for a harmonica solo. And he blew it.

No sound came out.

He frantically flipped it around like someone trying to solve a Rubik’s Cube until a shrill sound finally emerged to cheers from the crowd (the instrument was “backwards and upside down”, he explained afterwards).

The latest album’s stylistic detours continued on ‘All My Friends Are So Depressed’, whose gentle country shuffle and chugging train beat evoked Johnny Cash’s ‘I Walk The Line’ to my ears. It was a comparatively subdued moment, musically and lyrically, suggesting that Joyce Manor’s versatility extends beyond simply finding new ways to play fast.

Introducing ‘House Warning Party’, Johnson dated it back to 2009, although the track was later collected on the 2020 rarities album Songs From Northern Torrance. Then came a more immediate instruction:

“Let’s mosh!”

There were plenty of willing participants, with crowd-surfers occasionally passing horizontally overhead towards the front barrier. It comes with the territory at a punk show, where you’re never entirely sure when another concertgoer’s shoes or elbows might suddenly encounter the back of your head.

I was looking for a different kind of ‘Constant Headache’ and found it when Johnson ventured down from the stage for a brief barrier board meeting during its second verse, face-to-face with fans reaching out from the front row. It was one of those live-music moments that made me think maybe human’s not such a bad thing to be.

Joyce Manor’s music contains plenty of misery, but it’s often delivered in chipper tones. ‘Well, Whatever It Was’ returned us to the new album’s brighter side, pairing breezy guitars with nonchalant lyrics about life’s misfortunes. Its absurd opening couplet (“Had the worst day ever so far/Got run over by my dream car”) remains a common coffee-spluttering culprit for me.

Its late-Nineties Sugar Ray/Smash Mouth flavour is entirely intentional.

When the song first dropped, Johnson said it’s “got to be one of the most Southern California sounding songs ever recorded”, with Jane’s Addiction vibes in the verses and a whiff of Weezer and Beach Boys in the choruses. It also had a working title of ‘Shrek V’, acknowledging its resemblance to the kind of radio-friendly pop-rock associated with the animated film franchise. He initially worried his bandmates might find it too corny, but thankfully they embraced its kooky charms.

‘Catalina Fight Song’ brought the main set to a close with a rousing riff-fest before the hour was up. The band waved goodbye and stayed offstage almost as long as one of their songs.

Joyce Manor performing 'Well, Whatever It Was', live at Electric Ballroom, London (October 2026)

I’ll meet you there

Encores aren’t guaranteed for Joyce Manor headline shows, so we were grateful they didn’t skip town with a few more tunes in the tank.

Four more songs followed, along with a looseness the main set had largely rationed. We had time for extended conversation, audience requests, and the continuing adventures of those silly green cowboy hats.

As ‘Derailed’ reached its final notes, Johnson spotted somebody in the crowd still wearing one.

“He’s got the hat!” he blurted out. More headwear subsequently found its way over the barrier, prompting the singer to offer a droll assessment of the band’s unexpected new enterprise (“Joyce Manor has become a haberdasher”).

After a particularly spirited rendition of ‘Violent Inside’, the trading floor opened to song requests, with excited fans yelling out deep cuts and old favourites, knowing that the closing bell was only moments away.

A fan near the front requested ‘I Know Where Mark Chen Lives’, either forgetting it had appeared near the beginning of the gig or demanding a second rendition.

“We’ve already played that one, man,” Johnson replied amid the hubbub, with the blunt gentleness of a schoolteacher dealing with a peppy pupil.

The eventual choice was ‘Orange Julius’, another track from the band’s 2011 self-titled debut. Barely more than a minute long on record, it marked a return to Joyce Manor’s scrappiest beginnings, even if choosing it had taken longer than the performance itself.

‘Five Beer Plan’ provided an unusual but effective conclusion, opening with a comparatively restrained passage of bass and vocals that created a distinctly Midwestern-emo atmosphere before bursting into one final rush of punk energy.

We poured back onto Camden High Street in a symphony of sweat, wondering where the last hour or so had gone.

On the new album’s title track, Johnson remembers an ordinary bar that seems easy enough to recreate. The people he knew there, and the time they spent together, are another matter.

Joyce Manor’s ingredients are hardly elaborate either. Guitars, drums, and catchy hooks, packed into short sonic salvos that finish just as you’re settling into them. But no two rooms will ever sing those songs back quite the same way.

We went home with all that. A lucky few got a hat.

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