Pig Pen, the hardcore band fronted by acclaimed chef and The Bear actor Matty Matheson, wasn’t formally unveiled until earlier this year, just weeks before their sold-out debut gig in Toronto. But the seed for the project was planted decades earlier, in the fertile soil of the Niagara-area punk scene of the late ’90s and early 2000s. Back then, you could usually find Matheson and his Pig Pen bandmates – Alexisonfire’s Wade MacNeil, the prolific solo artist and former Attack In Black frontman Daniel Romano, Daniel’s brother and frequent collaborator Ian, and Young Guv’s Tommy Major – either onstage or in the pit at the punk squats and church basements of St. Catharine’s and Port Colborne, at clubs up in Hamilton and theaters down in Buffalo.

“Everyone at every show pretty much knew each other,” MacNeil says. “Because the shows weren’t that big. A lot of the shows I was going to back then were, like, 20 people, and that felt very, very normal. Dan, Matty, and I were all at the same types of punk and hardcore shows, and we’ve all just kept in touch through the years. And this is it: We finally got to do it together, in our forties.”

Matheson sang for a Niagara hardcore band called Hanging Hearts in the late ’90s, but he says it dissolved after “maybe 10 frigging shows” when their guitarist went to college. (“Never even put out a demo, either,” Matheson laments.) Before Pig Pen, the closest he ever got to collaborating with MacNeil and the Romanos was when he would jump in the van with Alexisonfire and Attack In Black for some of their first Canadian runs.

“He would have maybe said that he’s, like, roadying,” MacNeil recalls. “I don’t think he was really lifting anything, but he was there.”

“I definitely never loaded out,” Matheson laughs. “I can confirm. I feel like loading in, maybe I’d grab a merch box, grab a head, do something. Couple of drumsticks. But loading out, I was probably just outside smoking.”

Within a year or two, MacNeil and Romano’s bands had become their full-time jobs, and Matheson moved to Toronto to work in restaurant kitchens. Hardcore was still close to his heart, but as an ambitious line cook putting in around-the-clock shifts, there simply wasn’t time to do much else. “It just wasn’t a thing, being in a band,” he says. “I always had to work.”

Still, even after he became one of Canada’s most famous chefs and restaurateurs, Matheson would periodically hit up the old Niagara group chat to suggest starting a band. It wasn’t until the dawn of the pandemic – when MacNeil and Romano couldn’t tour, and Matheson wasn’t opening any restaurants – that the idea of a new project began to sound less like an idle daydream and more like something they could actually pull off. In 2022, the freshly minted Pig Pen found themselves huddled together at the Romanos’ studio in Welland, Ontario, clocking in for the 48-hour session that would yield their debut album, the menacing, doggedly old-school Mental Madness. The album’s final pre-release single, “Venom Moon Rising,” is out today.

The first thing that jumps out about Mental Madness is how little it resembles Alexisonfire, much less any of Daniel Romano’s various musical guises. This is heavy, straightforward, ’80s-style hardcore punk — played with conviction, absent of irony. Though they came up ensconced in a hardcore scene, the members of Pig Pen mostly found their success by applying aggressive, transformative tweaks to the genre’s formula. Alexisonfire’s emotive yet slyly proggy take on post-hardcore sat astride several punk scenes without fitting neatly into one, while Romano has touched on melodic hardcore, homespun indie rock, twangy alt-country, and paisley-tinged psychedelia across an impressive body of work. Whatever their sonic wanderings, hardcore was always in their blood.

“I remember playing shows where we were definitely veering away from a hardcore-forward kind of thing, and more into whatever the hell we did, but we were still playing with Fucked Up and Career Suicide at a record store in Hamilton,” Romano says. “It was fine, and people were cool about it, but I definitely remember feeling like, ‘Is this gonna fly?’ But because we came up within that, we carried the ethos of that forward, regardless of what kind of music we were doing. And I think that that kept us kind of aligned with that ideology.”

“I feel like when we were younger, we were trying very hard to not do [what] it felt like we should be doing,” MacNeil adds. “Like, for my band, it was, ‘How can we put more melody in this?’ And how can we not lean into the tropes of the time, or the stereotypes of this music? And now, with all this time passing, it’s like, ‘How can we lean into it?’ And it feels so good.”

Mental Madness was written entirely during the recording session, but Matheson brought a detailed mood board of references to the rest of the band before the studio time was even booked: Cro-Mags’ “Seekers Of The Truth” (“one of the nastiest songs ever written”), Born Against’s “Well Fed Fuck” (“one of the toughest songs ever written”), a smattering of old Poison Idea and Agnostic Front tunes.

“I had very specific ideas,” he says. “I had a bunch of songs where I was like, ‘This is what I think is actually the toughest shit.’ Not breakdowns, not fucking any of whatever the fuck’s going on now. It was like, ‘This shit is nasty. This shit is actually tough. This stuff is bad boy shit.’ I was just like, ‘Check this shit out,’ and then we wrote the album in eight hours.”

“There were discussions of reference off the top, but then it was kind of out the window,” Romano recalls. “Once the energy was in the room, we were just sort of cycling that.”

“In a weird way, it kind of started sounding way closer to Integrity, or something like that, which I was very surprised and happy [about],” MacNeil adds. “Us putting that super early New York stuff through our filters and trying to do it, it came out sounding like a little bit more like metallic hardcore.”

All four instrumentalists in Pig Pen have been full-time musicians for more than 20 years, and they mostly play music that’s a lot more technically demanding than anything on Mental Madness. The power-chord-based fretwork and played-straight drum parts, for them, represented an easy downshift and a welcome break from their usual patterns. MacNeil and Romano both said Pig Pen is some of the most fun they’ve ever had playing guitar. For Matheson, who hasn’t sung in a band in close to 25 years, there was a bit more of a learning process.

“My timing is horrible,” Matheson says, drawing out the last word for effect. “They were like, ‘Your timing fucking sucks,’ so, you know, shout out to Pro Tools. But I can definitely send my voice to the back of the room, so that definitely helps when recording music and screaming. The hardest thing was trying to make my voice deeper. Learning how to control that was the stuff that they really helped me with. Being like, ‘I want it to be meaner and angrier.’ Sometimes I’ll scream, and it doesn’t sound too angry. [Laughs.]”

MacNeil, in withering deadpan, doesn’t sound as concerned: “I mean, all he does is yell all the time, right? He was just waiting for some guys to play fast guitars under it.”

Listen to Mental Madness with any awareness of Matheson’s last decade of on-camera work – not just on The Bear, but via his huge back catalog of YouTube cooking videos and Bourdainian travel programs – and you’ll likely experience a moment of strange recognition. It’s the voice, the one you’ve heard yelling about Vietnamese pho and Montreal smoked meat a million times before. Only now, it’s screaming about self-loathing and mental illness. When Matheson roars the refrain to the album’s quasi-title track, “Mental Mentality” – “I’m sick, I’m sick, I’m sick!” – you can feel it in the pit of your stomach.

“A lot of these songs are written to me, by me,” he says. “I’m a mental case a lot of the time. It’s funny, kids are out there like, ‘What are you gonna sing about? Fucking oysters, and being on TV?’ And I’m just like, [sarcastically] ‘Yeah, for sure.’ I love that people think it’s that fickle. But I’m singing about everything that everybody’s singing about. We’re all human, and we all go through stuff, and this album, specifically, was at the end of the pandemic, but not really. It was after a long time of being home and thinking about life, thinking about what the fuck’s going on.”

“Matty’s obviously a frigging celebrity, so people are gonna chirp,” Romano says of the gatekeeper-y online response to Pig Pen live footage from Toronto, where a portion of the crowd seemed to be there more for a Matheson sighting than a hardcore show. He also, quite fairly, points out that, at the time of that show, Pig Pen only had 30 seconds of music out in the world. The pre-release singles from Mental Madness have already begun to cut through the noise about this being some celeb-rock vanity project. Nobody in the band seems to be too put out by the chatter, anyway.

“I’m not really sweating a bunch of jabronis what they think,” Matheson says. “I don’t need to justify who the fuck I am. I’m 43. There’s no fucking reason for me to be doing this, besides the fact that I love my friends, and we got together, and we did this in a time where we didn’t really have anything else to fucking do. I ain’t trying to take nothing off anybody’s plate…I’m just trying to fucking play some shows with my buddies and have fun, go the fuck off.”

Matheson does admit, though, that he’s eager for the second Pig Pen show, when people will know the lyrics well enough for him to do the time-honored hardcore trick of sticking the mic into the crowd: “I’m looking forward to that. I get winded, you know? I’m old.”

Mental Madness is out 6/27 via Flatspot.