By Jordan Michael (@jordwhyjames)
During our 33-minute conversation, Matt Korvette, the 42-year-old vocalist of the timeless Pissed Jeans, says “fun” eleven times and “fan” six times. The Sub Pop mainstays out of Philadelphia dropped their sixth album, Half Divorced, on March 1, and Korvette has it on repeat. Approaching two decades into being a band, Pissed Jeans has reached another milestone by, once again, writing great songs that they enjoy jamming out to.
photo credit: Ebru Yildiz
“Music is too much fun, and not a chore,” Korvette says. “It’s fun to make music that you want to listen to, volunteering time to something you love. I can appreciate someone like Scott Walker, who composes an incredible album and then never listens to it again, but that is not where our heads are at.”
Putting considerable time into an obsession that doesn’t make much money might be hard for passionless humans to understand, but people in the punk and hardcore community especially realize the importance of music. “We’re here because we like it,” says Korvette. “It’s not as if someone couldn’t make it in the real world and chose to go be a business person in the counterculture. You can sniff those people out easily, and it is not compelling. The moment you’re trying to please an imaginary audience, it’s just lame.”
Pissed Jeans is in too many clashing areas of rock—they’ve squirreled their way through all the sub-genres of punk rock, metal and hardcore—to make it easy to classify any audience for the band. With Half Divorced, it seems as if Pissed Jeans has conquered pop punk. Regardless, it’s another soundtrack of relentless, unforced, and extremely attractive music. How have they maintained their hunger?
“It’s so much fun,” says Korvette, mentioning that he is the Pissed Jeans member with the least musical talent. Bradley Fry (guitars), Sean McGuinness (drums), and Randy Huth (bass) make the majority of the noise. “We don’t operate on a traditional schedule—year of touring, album, tour—it’s more of a hobby. We’re super lucky to have an audience and a label. We go at our own pace and are all fans of different kinds of music.”
Korvette works from home, so his many records are at the ready; he’ll blow through the music. Recently, he’s been listening to Chisel, Don Cherry, The Cheater Slicks, Charles Bronson (not the actor), The Champs… he was in the Ch’s when we talked… Charm City Suicides… he never really sticks around in one thing for too long. Korvette has been writing his genuine underground music blog, YellowGreenRed, since at least 2012, and he just made a Substack for it. “I always loved music and writing, so it made sense to write about music. It’s easy to have a site, but you can’t care about making it or how much exposure and followers you’re going to get. There’s no business sense, I do it for fun.”
Any worthwhile writer is an avid reader, and Korvette admits to reading Post-Trash, checking out a review of Mary Jane Dunphe, who he is a big fan of. The melodic hardcore of Pissed Jeans in 2024 doesn’t seem to have any connection to Dunphe’s idiosyncratic, weird dance music, but it hammers home this fact: veteran bands that have an eclectic taste in listenership are willing to go wherever the playing goes. Pissed Jeans’ ultimate skill of totally ripping it remains, and they put a cover song on an album for the very first time—“Monsters,'' by The Pink Lincolns, a late 80s, early 90s punk band from Tampa, Florida.
“It was an oddball thing to throw in there,” Korvette says. “We like to do things we have never done before. The Pink Lincolns are an unheralded, underappreciated band with songs that kick ass, and we put it where it fits.”
Despite having six albums and a Sub Pop track record, Pissed Jeans is an underrated band. They don’t work at their band tirelessly because work is not fun, and they’re not uber savvy at social media; they can’t sell you anything at any time.
“Even if you’re making the greatest songs on Earth, it’s easy for the algorithms of the day to say, ‘Nope, No Share, Sorry,’ and, OK, that’s it, we can’t complain,” says Korvette. “It’s not The World versus Pissed Jeans, every band is screwed in the same way. You might be more savvy, more shameless, or you might just hit a certain moment. We’re still of that generation where it is embarrassing to self-promote, but we have loosened up on that a bit. We do have to let people know that we exist, at least.”
Pissed Jeans is in its first album cycle in seven years, and “Monsters” is not the only cover song they recorded. New Noise Magazine released the bands’ exclusive cover of Lou Reed’s “Waves of Fear,” which Korvette believes could have been a Pissed Jeans song all along. “We love that song, such big fans, and we did it for fun,” he says. “It’s not the most consequential thing, but something fun. That song captures the vibe of where we’re at at this point.”
The key to Pissed Jeans’ longevity is never making it more than a fun hobby, Korvette says. “Make it compelling, not an obligation. No three-month road trips [the band never plays more than 10 shows in a row, and its longest tour was an 18-show trek through Europe in May 2008]. Touring isn’t my favorite; I like clean sheets, privacy and home-cooked food. However, when we are on stage, we want it to be worth the dollars. It’s great to be on stage and really feeling it.”
Pissed Jeans played one show in 2020 (February 22), two dates in 2021 (November 6 and December 18), and nine shows in 2022. They played thirteen gigs in 2023, and have eleven scheduled for 2024, including the three already in the books from album-release weekend. Summation: Pissed Jeans put all their energy into their live performances, which are loud and chaotic.
Seven years is a long gap between studio albums, but Korvette doesn’t seem to have any qualms about it. “I would have liked to release it sooner, but we probably would have without COVID,” he says. “At least a year was shaved off. We don’t send music files to each other… we’ve tried, but it doesn’t go well. We need to be in the same room, sharing ideas. I hope we write a bunch of songs now, too; it [Half Divorced sessions] went really well. We’re going to devote our time to the shows we have coming up [Philly, Brooklyn, and dates in the UK with Jade Hairpins]. We have a good groove going.”
Despite being in their early 40s, and each having fatherly duties, Pissed Jeans is not mellowing out. They do not have a predetermined punk rock retirement plan. “This feels like our most aggressive album yet, fast tempos overall,” Korvette says. “That wasn't the plan, but that’s the shape it took. Black Flag, Minor Threat, and Dead Kennedys all mellowed out with age, slowed down, got more melodic, quieter… it’s fun to go the opposite way. At first, it was a reaction to punk/hardcore as a race to be the fastest band, not worrying about a memorable riff, just being fast.”
Korvette, Fry, McGuiness and Huth are all on the same chemistry page, knowing the right times to ramp Pissed Jeans up, or cool it down. “We all became dads around the same time,” says Korvette, mentioning that the kids understand Pissed Jeans, and are big fans. “There was no odd one out in the band, no holding out. We all relate in that way, all have had different relationships throughout the band’s existence. We’ve had similar experiences, and we all support each other—it’s really special to know these guys for so long and to be so close.”
Somehow, Pissed Jeans got to a sixth album, regardless of black smoke still rising from the Earth’s surface. “To me, the themes of this record are about wanting to find a third way out,” Korvette says. “I don’t want to pick Team Trump or Team Biden, and then go fight. Fuck that, this is all bullshit, let’s go elsewhere because these choices are disgusting. I want anything that is not a binary choice. There’s other possibilities down this hole.”
Half Divorced is a nice, complete thought. The centerpiece is “Everywhere Is Bad,” a ridiculous song in Korvette’s viewpoint, a lyrical list of everything being bad, no matter where you live. The album ends with “Moving On,” a piece about trying not to shoehorn situations into existing. “I can be stubborn if I have my mind really set on something that doesn’t work out, but I try to be aware of it.”
Pissed Jeans has sounded evil in the past, but they are now fully formed, having a field day with pop punk. “You could throw one of these songs on another PJ record, and it would mostly make sense—this isn’t our industrial synth-wave record—it feels normal to me,” Korvette says. “I was excited to write catchier songs, however, songs that fans can get amped up to see and that are fun to play live.”
Pissed Jeans might be the coolest punk band on the planet, depending on what the definition of “cool” is these days. In that sense, it seems as if it is Pissed Jeans versus The World.
“Simply, there is no way to be cool,” Korvette concludes, “especially when you’ve hit a sixth album. We’re clearly not new; we’re old, we don’t care. It feels cool to not want to be cool. It’s the best. It’s the beauty of not feeling inclined to impress anyone, no need to show that you deserve anything, that you are punk or edgy. It’s embarrassing to try too hard. We're more comfortable in our own skin.”