Photos and review by ALYSON CAMUS
LOS ANGELES – Mannequin Pussy is more than just a band you see for a fun night out—they have a message, and there’s no doubt they’re a politically charged musical act. This is especially evident when frontwoman and multi-instrumentalist Marisa ‘Missy’ Dabice engages the crowd, either with her seductive, sensual whispers between songs or when she fiercely delivers her punk anthems, supported by guitarist Maxine Steen and bassist Colins ‘Bear’ Regisford. While the entire band radiates energy, they leave most of the show-stopping intensity to Missy’s scream-in-your-face performance.
Mexican grunge band Margaritas Podridas (Rotten Daisies) kicked off the night with an impressive blend of gritty distortion and dark shoegaze. Bassist-vocalist Carolina Enriquez led her ferocious band with raw, raging screams and guttural vocals. The volume was so intense that the lyrics, possibly a mix of Spanish and English, were hard to decipher and her set was a blur of flying blonde hair, roaring guitars, deafening noise, and legs kicking through the air. While a few tracks felt even more aggressive than others, the overall vibe radiated punk rebellion and chaos, with harsh guitar riffs, bold stage presence, and clear influences from bands like Nirvana, Sonic Youth, and Hole.
Mannequin Pussy opened the show with the soft and restrained “I Don’t Know You” from their new album I Got Heaven, and, aside from the spiraling guitar, hinting at the fury to come, you wouldn’t have guessed you were at a punk show. The dynamic, drum-heavy “Sometimes” and the catchy “Nothing Like” sparked a loud reaction from the crowd, but Missy still used her high-pitched voice like a sweet invitation for indie rock sing-alongs. In the early part of the set, she almost channeled Karen O of Yeah Yeah Yeahs, though this didn’t last long. Mannequin Pussy seamlessly blends indie rock with hardcore, effortlessly shifting from subtle melodies to ear-piercing dissonance, embodying the bipolar extremes of frenzied, anger-filled rants and seductive, sensual whispers. From start to finish, they were utterly captivating.
Wearing knee-high black boots and an intricate, wild dress made of heterogeneous materials that resembled a spider web—perfectly timed just two weeks before Halloween—she commanded the stage from start to finish, running, jumping, dancing, and throwing herself across it. As the show progressed, both she and the band grew increasingly aggressive, while she addressed the crowd with her best whispery ASMR voice, asking the boys to shout “pussy!” together just before the primal, collective scream of “Loud Bark.” She effortlessly shifted from a honey-sweet voice to a screaming banshee’s yell, moving between sweetness and hysteria in mere seconds.
Before the title track of their new album, she delivered the first long discourse about God, shame, and religion: “I’d like to dedicate this next song to any of your God-fearing parents out there who’ve ever worked very hard to try to make you feel ashamed of the person that you are! … because shame is this very interesting thing that keeps being passed down from generation to generation and wouldn’t it be beautiful if it was our generation who ended it?… here’s the thing, I have an open mind I have a very open heart, and it is entirely possible that at one time the words in the Bible may have been the words of God but those words were translated by men, kings, by Christian fascists who are trying to control!”
It wasn’t the only powerful statement of the night, and the crowd’s energy grew more intense with each of Missy’s declarations. “Of Her” and “Aching” were pure hardcore blasts, short, hyper-aggressive tracks where Missy and her bandmates fired on all cylinders, delivering a riotous performance.
They played nearly all of “I Got Heaven,” along with a handful of tracks from “Romantic,” “Perfect,” and “Patience,” sequencing their set with dance-worthy rockers that cranked up the intensity to a point where the front rows of the venue felt almost unsafe. By then, there was no turning back—it was pure punk fury and glorious chaos.
Fueled by the crowd’s enthusiasm, Dabice’s energy seemed boundless, and the show’s intensity never let up, especially after “Perfect.” “If someone forced you to come to the show, don’t worry baby it’s gonna be over soon,” she joked.
At one point, the energy paused for a few minutes as Missy, channeling her best Marilyn Monroe-like whisper, shifted the focus to heavy topics: capitalism, government, loss, and war: “What they want from us is just to consume and consume and be fearful and hateful of anyone else because everyone else is just in your way! I don’t think that’s true, especially in the country where they tell you all the time that the greatest thing that you could possibly aspire to is to be a billionaire… as though that means something!…
“The truth is that all of us in this room are closer to having nothing than we are to being billionaires,” she said. “Two weeks ago, we were supposed to play a show in Ashville NC, and we have so many friends, so many people who have lost everything and it could happen to any of us… Who is always going to be there for you if it’s not your community, it’s not your neighbor? But they want you to see your neighbor as a threat to your own success!… We are disgusted that the money that we’ve worked so hard for and get back to the government gets spent on their bombs and weapons to kill innocent civilians!… This is the part of the set where we invite you to partake in the primal scream because if you are not able to find a way to access that side of you, if you do not learn how to transform your rage into something other than something that sits inside of you, it will eat away your body like a poison!”
Each part of her long speech was met with loud cheers from the crowd, and if the lyrics hadn’t made it clear already, the band’s political stance was impossible to ignore.
The rapid-fire “Clams” was followed by the explosive new track ‘OK? OK! OK? OK!’ which electrified the audience. Dabice then stepped back from her frontwoman role for “Pigs is Pigs,” leaving bassist Colins Regisford to deliver the song with the full fury of a Black man in America, screaming out against police violence.”
“This will be our last two songs, there will be no encore, encores are self-indulgent bullshit” she told us before “Emotional High” and the yelled and fervent singalong that “Romantic” turned into. “We would like to dedicate this song to anyone who came along to the show tonight; you know what that means about you: that you don’t need anyone to validate the shit that you need.”
The show was a series of explosive eruptions, with Dabice holding nothing back as she spat her emotionally charged lines over our heads, much to everyone’s delight. On Friday night, Mannequin Pussy delivered a visceral, high-energy performance that was relentless and unforgettable, captivating a packed crowd high on the electrifying energy of the Philadelphia band.
Setlist
I Don’t Know You
Sometimes
Nothing Like
Control
Softly
Denial
Loud Bark
I Got Heaven
Of Her
Aching
Anything
Everything
Kiss
Perfect
Clams
OK? OK! OK? OK!
Pigs Is Pigs
Emotional High
Romantic
