Chartbreaker: How Working With Bad Religion’s Guitarist Yielded Joyce Manor Its First Radio Hit in Its 15-Year Career

In many ways, the story of Joyce Manor’s alt-rock radio breakthrough is typical: Local band builds a devoted following, wins over the big regional station, and swarms the airwaves with the super-catchy lead single to its new album. The main difference with the pop-punk group is its timing: It’s taken the band nearly 15 years to finally score its first radio hit, with the jangly meta-downer “All My Friends Are So Depressed.”

That’s hardly to say the Torrance, Calif., trio was toiling in obscurity for the prior decade and a half. Joyce Manor became a punk and emo scene favorite and Tumblr sensation following its 2011 self-titled debut, and it has since expanded its reach to include famous fans like blink-182’s Mark Hoppus (who joined the band to sing “Heart Tattoo” at its 2024 Hollywood Palladium show celebrating the 10th anniversary of its defining album Never Hungover Again) and star comedian John Mulaney (who had the band perform on his Netflix talk show Everybody’s Live with John Mulaney last year).

“It’s really evenly paced,” says frontman Barry Johnson of the band’s growth from basement breakout to something fairly close to rock stardom. “We’ve never had that Turnstile moment where you blink, and it’s like, ‘Wait a minute. They’re like, the biggest band on Earth?…’ Things that aren’t tied to an album push, typically, have kept people aware of us. But it has been really incremental.”

Instead, Joyce Manor has built a sustainable career the old-fashioned way: “Just in playing good shows and putting out good records,” as Ravenhouse’s Drew McKinley, the band’s longtime co-manager along with Juan Luis Carrera, puts it. “There’s a certain level of consistency.”

That reliability became a particular boon to the trio — comprising Johnson, guitarist Chase Knobbe and bassist Matt Ebert — during the pandemic, when the longtime road warriors were forced to take a live break, and fans got a chance to miss their dependability. “Joyce Manor came out of COVID twice as big as they went in,” says Carrera. “So many things popped out of that, whether it’s selling out a Palladium [show or] John Mulaney [booking them].”

Now, the band can add a top 25 hit on Billboard’s Alternative Airplay chart to its list of recent achievements, thanks to “Depressed.” The song also marks the group’s first time working with Brett Gurewitz as producer; Gurewitz was an early inspiration to the band as guitarist for Los Angeles punk greats Bad Religion, and he’s a co-founder (and in-house producer) for Epitaph Records, the label home for Joyce Manor since 2014.

“I secretly wanted to [produce them] for a long time,” admits Gurewitz, who feared that volunteering his services would be viewed by the band as an offer they couldn’t refuse. (The band says they assumed he simply didn’t have time: “Dude, you’re a dad — you have multiple labels, you have a publishing company — you’re busy!’” Johnson recalls thinking.)

But such an opportunity arose when Johnson was frustrated in the studio translating the vision he had for “Depressed” — whose mix of gentle despair and country-fried Americana he considers his spin on Lana Del Rey, despite admitting he’s not actually being that familiar with her work. He then consulted Gurewitz for his take. As Gurewitz recalls telling Johnson, “I was thinking it would have like this sort of ‘80s Smiths vibe.” Johnson replied, “Well, why don’t you record it the way you would do it?”

Gurewitz’s simpler take on the song, with cleaner guitars, was to the group’s liking and led him to produce the entirety of the band’s forthcoming seventh album, I Used To Go to This Bar (due Jan. 30, 2026), perhaps the most direct and radio-ready Joyce Manor album to date, with more fully fleshed-out songs than fans expect from the band’s famously lean releases. “It’s short and sweet, like all Joyce Manor records,” Gurewitz says, “but I managed to get them to add some choruses.”

“Depressed” caught the attention of legendary L.A. alt-rock station KROQ, which had been scoping the band since its level-up 2023 gig at Long Beach Arena. While the band’s 2010s pop-punk sound was an awkward fit for the station in the decade of Twenty One Pilots and Imagine Dragons, it tapped into something more timeless with the Smiths- and Cure-reminiscent track.

Bassist Matt Ebert calls it “so incredibly thrilling” and guitarist Chase Knobbe says it’s a trip to hear his song on the station responsible for “a lot of [my] early musical memories.” On the other hand, Johnson’s reflexive response is anxiety: “I feel like they’re going to stop the song,” he says. “They’re [going to go], ‘Hey, sorry about that… We didn’t mean to play that. It was not any good, and we’ll never do it again.’ ”

KROQ has yet to express such regrets — and with one of the nation’s premiere alt-rock stations leading the way, the format has (slowly, of course) started to embrace “Depressed.” The song holds at its No. 22 high on the Alternative Airplay chart dated Dec. 13, its 11th week on the listing.

With a new album that McKinley calls “definitely a level up for them” and a live presence that’s constantly hitting new benchmarks (“Every L.A. show we’ve ever done has been our biggest L.A. show,” says Johnson), the doors are open for Joyce Manor to continue its ascent. In 2023, the band played amphitheaters and pavilions as openers on a summer tour with Weezer, and its managers say they could someday be headlining such venues themselves.

“That’s the trajectory,” says McKinley. “There’s a new level of maturity as a band in Barry’s songwriting, and a new confidence — playing shows with Weezer, and being on those bigger stages, is definitely setting the pathway forward for that.” Carrera adds: “They feel really comfortable on those stages now. They’re going to be replacing those bands at that level [one day], and bringing somebody up with them.”

Johnson is open to (if somewhat trepidatious about) that prospect — but true to his band’s approach, if he gets to that apex someday, he certainly doesn’t want to get there all at once. “Gradually, we’re like, ‘Oh, we’re kind of high up here now, aren’t we?’ I didn’t rocket up there, you know? So I would like to keep that pace.”

A version of this story appears in the Dec. 13, 2025, issue of Billboard.