by Benji Heywood (@benjiheywood)
Progress isn’t linear. It leaps and stumbles, erodes and stalls, creating a gap between the actual and the aspirational. It’s within this gap that Art can be impactful.
Devin McKnight, the artist who performs as Maneka, is no stranger to liminal spaces. The singer and songwriter, who is Black, cut his teeth playing guitar in indie rock bands, a traditionally white space. On 2022’s critically-lauded Dark Matters, McKnight excavated his experience while asking larger questions about race in America. The goal, McKnight said in an interview published by Talkhouse, was to help create a “space for Black people in rock music.”
Maneka’s new album bathes and listens—out now on Topshelf Records—finds McKnight turning inward, riding the tension between the personal and the universal. The results are affecting. From album opener “shallowing,” Maneka has never sounded better, nor has the music been as immediate. Engineered by Alex Farrar (Wednesday, Snail Mail), bathes and listens soars with layered guitars and McKnight’s searching vocals.
Post-Trash caught up with McKnight from his home base in Philadelphia to discuss the making of bathes and listens, the nature of progress, and how compassion and empathy can shape the future.
This conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Maneka by Juliette Boulay
Post-Trash: The new album rips. I’m really enjoying listening to it. How are you feeling about it?
Devin McKnight: I was just hanging out with the Ovlov people the other day and I was telling Steve (Hartlett) that this album is some of my favorite stuff I’ve done. The album feels more current and fleshed out than previous albums.
PT: Is the first album where you worked with an outside producer?
DM: Well, just to give a little bit of background, my friend Mike Thomas used to live really close to me in Brooklyn. He’s done a lot of great records and we worked together so much that we could finish one another’s sentences [editor’s note McKnight and Thomas were both in the band Grass Is Green]. I did the first three albums with him. At first, to save time and money—because when you live in Brooklyn, time and money are always scarce—I would get the records as close to done as possible then bring them to Mike. I was always really proud of how those records turned out. And then with the third record (Dark Matters), I actually went and tracked with Mike, which I think opened me up to the idea (of tracking with someone).
PT: So, how did you connect with Alex Farrar?
DM: He reached out to me, actually! At the time, I was kinda thinking, what am I doing? What is the future of this project? I’d moved to Philly, got a job here, and I had these songs, but were they any good? And then (Alex) emailed me out of the blue, and was like, Hey, man. Do you want to try and record a couple songs with me and see how we mesh? At first, I was like, I don’t know—because no one in the industry offers you anything, like what’s the catch? Was this a real person? So, I checked him out on Instagram and saw his resume and was like, oh! Yeah, all right. And I took him up on his offer. Originally it was just going to be two songs…
PT: Would that have been at Drops of God?
DM: In Asheville, yeah. Asheville is awesome. It was a super comfortable environment. They have a little apartment in the studio, so you just wake up in the morning, brew some coffee and go downstairs and it's time to work. And that kind of flow worked really well for me. (In the first session) we got four songs done in three days. It felt like new energy was breathed into me. I felt revitalized. So, I went back and did the rest of the record.
PT: That’s so cool, him hitting you up cold like that.
DM: You know, I've always been a little bit—I won't say spoiled—but just having people like Mike Thomas in my life made it so that I never had to really reach out to anyone or seek out a special ear or anything. Alex has a different style, which opened me up to doing stuff I wasn't used to, which sort of helped me develop, I think, in a cool way. I'm really happy that he reached out to me.
PT: What kind of stuff did you do that you weren’t used to?
DM: Oh, man, it’s been so long…
PT: How long ago did you record?
DM: I think Thanksgiving 2023…
PT: Ok, so, a couple of years. Sort of standard timeline?
DM: I’m really impatient! (laughs) I’m like, let’s get it finished and put it out. As far as different comfort zones, Alex pushed me to do a lot of harmonies. I only learned to sing not that long ago, so in the past I’d get one of my bandmates to provide harmonies. But Alex pushed me to be more ambitious on my own. And then, another thing, he’d have me triple or quadruple-track my guitar parts.
PT: That makes sense. This is a guitar record. I mean, all the Maneka records have been guitar records, but this one is a guitar record.
DM: I think from a technical standpoint, there's nothing wrong with stacking guitars. Obviously, a lot of huge bands do it, but I think you got to know what to do with all the tracks. Some people are kind of sloppy with it—like, let's just record it five times over and it'll sound huge—but then it comes out sounding like a muddy mess. But with Alex, every time we did it, it sounded really cool.
PT: A couple minutes ago when you were talking about the time right before Alex contacted you, it sounded like you were in a place of transition. Take me back there. What was going on that made you uncertain about the future of Maneka? Because from a listener’s perspective, Dark Matters was really cool and it seemed like the project was moving forward.
DM: I was very confident in the Dark Matters album because I feel like Mike and I did a really good job, especially with the time we had. And it got some good press. But post-pandemic, it was like, who knows what’s gonna happen? And after touring, the financial realities of it all really hit home.
PT: Yeah, a lot of the bands I speak to talk about how difficult it is to afford tour.
DM: We had some good tours, like with Pile, but the DIY ones… The last tour really crushed me financially. I won’t go into the gory details, but there’d be times on those 12-hour drives through the mountains where I’d be thinking about the amount of debt I was getting into. Was it worth it? Did I bite off more than I could chew? Short answer, yes.
There was a time, in 2019, when I thought I saw the light at the end of tunnel. I was like, I could make this life work. Flash forward to 2023, 2024 and the price of everything in Brooklyn quadrupled, it seemed like overnight. And I was like, how do people do this?
I remember my dad had a conversation with me, sort of asking me what do you want to do here, man? So, I started looking for jobs and found one here in Philly at an Arts nonprofit. I moved and suddenly I had more space to breathe, more space to think. I was at the point where I was thinking, maybe I should just play in other people’s bands, play locally and do (Maneka) as a recording project.
PT: Do you think just playing in other people’s bands would have been enough for you?
DM: (laughs) I mean, it clearly wasn’t. I was in Grass Is Green and Speedy Ortiz, so I wouldn’t say I was just in someone else’s band, but at the same time, it wasn’t 100% mine either. And at times, it didn’t feel completely fulfilling. I would still gladly do it, but I don’t think it could be my main thing—unless it was the coolest band ever.
PT: Who’s the coolest band ever that would make just playing guitar worth it?
DM: I mean, If Deftones came knocking… I would probably die happy if I played with Deftones. But, you know, until that day…
PT: I want to ask you about the themes of this record. Because in the past you’ve been straight-forward about what your music is about. These songs seem more inwardly-focused or maybe the meaning is less overt when compared to Dark Matters. What would you say is the narrative of bathes and listens?
DM: With Dark Matters I was trying to conduct conversations about race in a space where people don’t usually bring that up, not because they’re bad people, but because there aren’t a whole lot of people of color to have those conversations with. The record was like a thesis statement, very thought out and cohesive, and that was cool. But the whole discourse became exhausting for me. And with the state of politics these days, I didn’t want to be seen as the Black guy who’s always having some cultural racial conundrum. I didn’t want to be pushed into a corner where that’s all that would be expected of me. That would be a shame.
So, for this one, I really wanted to do the opposite. If you look at the album cover, it's this grainy, unclear picture of a mirror. This album is like an uncomfortable and sometimes unclear look at myself from different areas.
PT: The album feels super personal, but without being too… solipsistic?
DM: I think that’s kind of the point. I didn't want to make too many bold, public assertions about my personal life or upbringing, because I don't want people to think that I have an opinion of myself that my problems are so pressing. But they are my problems, so I am going to talk about them. In that way, the album’s an understated survey of my personal feelings at the time.
PT: Can you speak to the exhaustion you were feeling after Dark Matters? Were you feeling that as a Black person who's in this traditionally white rock space, that people expected you to be speaking for all Black people?
DM: Not necessarily, but at the same time, I think you're always doing that anyway, just in regular life, sadly. But I think what was kind of cool was that at the same time when I was doing stuff, there were other Black people and people of color really making moves in indie rock. So, in some ways, I didn't necessarily feel that pressure, because if I didn't say it well enough, then like, Soul Glo would probably have something to say. There are other people carrying that message at the same time, so in that way, it felt nice to feel like a part of a thing that was happening.
PT: What do you see as the best-case scenario for this country going forward?
DM: People just need to have more compassion and empathy, through and through. The cacophonous discourse that exists creates an environment where people are just shouting past each other. So, the best-case scenario is social media as we know it ceases to exist and for people to find more compassion and empathy for one another.
PT: It feels like progress in America has regressed in recent years.
DM: That could be true. Or it could be that we hadn’t got as far as we thought we had in the first place. That's a realization that I think is tough for people, because it's like, I grew up in the 90s, when “there was no racism.” But looking back on it, you're like, I missed that crazy thing that was going on because I wasn't paying attention.
I grew up in Silver Spring, Maryland in the DC area, which is a really multicultural place. I was almost spoiled in that way. And when I went other places, I was always shocked at how intolerant people seemed, or how intentionally closed-off their communities seemed. Personally, that probably led to a naive thought that, oh, we've progressed so far.
But we could also view it as shit got real in the ‘60s and ‘70s then we took a two-decade break from progress, kind of stayed at the same spot, elected a black president then boom! Everything's crazy, now, you know? So, I can't speak for the other side, but on our side, I think, yeah, compassion, empathy, trying to put yourself in other people's shoes and stop jumping down people's throats.
The new album from Maneka, bathes and listens, is out now on Top Shelf Records.