AT THE BEGINNING of the decade, “mid-tempo” was still a faux pas by pop-punk standards; people still considered early Weezer a guilty pleasure, and the term “’90s revival” wouldn’t become a fixture of lazy blogosphere parlance for at least another year. That all seemed to change, virtually overnight—Torrance, California band Joyce Manor’s self-titled record made catchy, guitar solo-laden punk cool again.
But trailblazing is no walk in the park. In 2014, after two years of heavy touring and inescapable hype, lead singer and songwriter Barry Johnson’s redlining stress levels culminated in what the music press framed as a “meltdown.” What actually happened was less exciting: Johnson politely asked a member of the audience at a Jacksonville, Florida show to stop crushing a group of teenage girls with his body, although a week later he’d properly freak out at a stage-diving member of the audience in Houston, calling them a “patriotic, straight-edge piece of shit.”
Johnson’s comments created a schism between conscientious punks and adults who still like Screeching Weasel. (Alternative Press published an article with the headline “Joyce Manor shame stage-diver at show.”) “I sometimes miss how crazy some of our shows would be, but it’s this thing where you can’t really draw a soft line,” says Johnson. “I hated seeing people get hurt, or see people go hard, because we’re not a hard band—I saw a lot of people leaving in ambulances at the end of our shows.”