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Music

The Menzingers Are Not Above Drinking Shoe Beers

Well, some of them anyway.

Greg Barnett's girlfriend is pissed at him and it's all Australia's fault.

The singer/guitarist and his bandmates in Scranton, PA punk outfit the Menzingers had just returned from a short tour jaunt in Australia when I got him on the phone from his Philadelphia abode. Barnett only slept until 4 AM that morning (prompting his girlfriend's displeasure for her early awakening) but was super genial and stoked to talk about the band's spectacular new record Rented World.

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Along with the jet lag, we fought through loud helicopter noise over Barnett's home as he walked me through the album's maturation, working with a new producer from outside the punk scene, and what's next for the burgeoning band.

Read on for the hopefully still coupled Barnett's comments and blast Rented World—it's the band's best record yet, full of earnest, massive-riff pop-punk jams.

Noisey: You just got back from Australia. Had you been there before?
Greg Barnett: This wasn't my first time going, we had done some big festivals over there and some support for Pennywise. This was our first time as a headliner.

Was it the first time the band was playing Rented World songs live?
Yeah, we played a couple for the first time. It was pretty awesome to see people already knowing the words and shouting along already.

The new record is great. Going into the recording process, was there a pressure there to build off the success of the previous album, On The Impossible Past?
Honestly, that pressure wasn't there until we started doing press for this record. [Laughs] So I guess it was there? We didn't think about it in terms like that. We just recorded songs we liked and everything came kind of natural. There was not a huge process of having to top the ideas of the last record.

I'm sure there was a subconscious pressure that we wanted to write better songs but we didn't go in like 'oh shit, people really liked the last album we better make this one better'.

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What is the writing process like for the band? There's a lot of personal things and raw emotion in these songs.
Well, Tom (May) and I write the lyrics. As far as songwriting, all four of us write together. The process always seems to change from album to album. We used to live in a house together and wrote in the basement. There were no PAs that actually worked so a lot of those songs came out of having to write just from the environment we were in. Like, "We couldn't hear those chords but this version works!'"Once we got a better space and functioning equipment we were able to write more collaboratively.

Another new aspect in recording was bringing in Jon Low (produced the National, Kurt Vile) to produce this record. Why him?
We had been talking to producers and nothing was really clicking and then we got to Jon through a friend and we all thought, maybe we should just talk to him about doing it? Once he was interested in the project it was a no brainer. He was in Philadelphia and everything clicked.

Did any of his previous work push you to working with him or was it more a proximity thing?
We had all heard his stuff before. We love the record he made with the National. It was cool working with him because he was someone kind of outside of our scene. It's cool to have people hear our stuff from maybe a different perspective. We wrote this one different from how we normally do. We did bass and drums live, which of course gives more of a live feel and the vocals took way longer than previous albums.

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Did the longer recording time ever get frustrating since it sounds like you guys normally knocked stuff out kind of fast?
I wouldn't say frustrating. I would say Jon is very technical when it comes to the vocals. He doesn't normally edit things. He really makes sure he gets what he wants. On the last record, we did three days of vocals. This record was two weeks. So I guess that could be a bit frustrating but you just had to keep going at it until things were perfect.

You mentioned Jon coming from outside your scene. Is that a conscious thing where you guys want to branch out of a punk scene, seeing as Jon has mostly worked with indie rock acts.
I don't know how conscious it is. It wasn't like a motivation to finish this thing. No one was like, "Oh let's get this guy so we can become some big indie rock act!" That wasn't the idea. Of course we'd like to branch out and have more people hear our music. We would never discriminate against anyone who wants to listen to us. At the same time, we're not trying to be pigeonholed into just a punk scene or some indie rock scene.

Last thing, I saw on your Twitter feed someone drank beer out of a shoe in Australia. Who did this and why in the hell?
That was Tom. Shoe beers, man. It's a thing they do in Australia. They're crazy over there. We were playing one night and someone tossed a shoe onto stage so he had to do a "shoey." People kept passing up beers and he did not stop. He probably had ten shoeys over the course of two songs.

You didn't partake?
No way. No fucking way I'm drinking out of someone else's shoe!

Rented World is out this week from Epitaph.

Luke McCormick drinks his tweets out of a shoe - @LUKEmccorm