FETT!
The plan was to start a band that was all longtime friends. The idea was to embrace the scene they grew up in. The conspirators are as follows: Matty Matheson (singer), who grew up in the Niagara hardcore scene (with his late 90's band, Hanging Hearts), and who has gone on to become a chef and restaurateur. Wade MacNeil (guitarist), an active member of Alexisonfire and Doom’s Children. The Romano brothers, Daniel(guitarist) and Ian(drummer), rock’n’roll veterans from Daniel Romano’s Outfit and Tommy Major (bassist) of Young Guv -Tommy and the Commies - Daniel Romano’s Outfit.
“It was during the pandemic and we were all back home,” says Matheson. The conversations began - to make something heavy, noisy and touched on the classic 80’s hardcore we all love so much. Everyone showed up with a bunch of riffs, scraps of lyrics, talked influences and principles, bounced ideas back and forth, then got chinese food. “We wrote 10 songs in one day,” says Matheson, “and the next day we recorded them.”
What resulted is the band Pig Pen. And, from this flash of inspiration, the group’s debut full length, Mental Madness, will be released on Flatspot Records June 27th. It’s tough and it’s harsh, the music is dark and noisy, and it’s got depth. There’s an ease to the energy too that spiritually aligns it with those rare fully realized hardcore demos from the classic era — one of those golden, hallowed megaphone announcements that show up now and then in the scene from a band with good ideas, who seemingly came out of nowhere, but who knew what they were from the jump, and who just did it.
Due to the band members’ extracurriculars, Pig Pen is starting off as a contained explosion and a distilled expression, which is what the music itself is about. The subject matter on Mental Madness sticks to themes that Matheson describes as “mental health shit”: topics like isolation, loneliness, and “letting your mind destroy you.” A representative sample: “Teach me to hate myself, teach me not to care,” bellows Matheson in “Mental Mentality,” the band’s first single—“I’m sick, I’m sick, I’m sick,” during the bridge. These are words that might ring an alarm bell, but sound perfectly at home in a hardcore song, but are they ever just hardcore lyrics?
”You can be having a beautiful day, surrounded by friends,” Matheson explains, “and your brain can continuously ruin it. No matter how good or bad your life is, you can still hate yourself. I've got to ask myself why am I feeling the ways I'm feeling?” In other words, the record is about experiencing life, feeling all the feelings in the sunshine and the dark corners.
If that’s what the songs are about, the band is about something different: Just being a band. “Our love of each other is what makes it”, says Matheson. “Joyousness,” concurs Dan Romano. Friends having fun. It comes across on the record as an expression of happiness. Is that a dichotomy? Not exactly. “There’s a sense of community in that hardcore scene we came up in,” says Romano, “and those early enlightenments, they stay with you.” And though everyone in the band has branched out since those days, “hardcore is always the same in some ways,” Matheson says, “this is a scene of of giving, of sharing, of going the fuck off. That’s it, really.” That’s Pig Pen.
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