Long Winter’s carnivalesque grandeur may be the furthest thing from the basement shows where the members of Fucked Up first bonded, but it’s a natural outgrowth of the work they began in Toronto’s hardcore trenches nearly two decades ago. Even though the band has since moved far beyond that scene’s musical aesthetics, they’re still applying hardcore’s fundamental principles of DIY determinism to a post-everything world.

“When we were 20, we only listened to punk music and had punk friends,” Haliechuk observes during a cafe meeting with Zucker. “And now we’re older and we have different kinds of friends. The whole point of Long Winter is: We’re not trying to grow. We’re not going to put on the next Grimes show. We’re not reaching for the most-blogged-about thing. It’s mostly to say: This is our community.”

For Haliechuk and Zucker, that sense of community was shaped in the late 1990s at Who’s Emma?, a now-defunct anarchist co-operative—part record/bookstore, part all-ages venue—in Toronto’s eternally boho Kensington Market neighborhood. It’s where Haliechuk put on his first show, hosting Dillinger Escape Plan’s debut Toronto performance in 1998.

“Mike doesn’t like to bring up the past,” Abraham says during a separate interview at the midtown Toronto house he shares with his wife and two sons. (A third child is on the way.) “But I look at Long Winter as being like a continuation of the punk/squat-shows he used to do, where he cooked food for all the bands and the people working the show.”

True to his reputation as a human punk-rock encyclopedia, Abraham’s house is a veritable Library of Congress for hardcore ephemera, including entire rooms devoted to plastic-bag-preserved zines and 7”s. A living-room photo of Abraham and his oldest son Holden flanking Iggy Pop serves as a bless-this-house totem.

“I’ve become so obsessed with the past because Josh and Mike are just so beyond their past,” Abraham says as he retrieves his only copy of Zucker and Haliechuk’s self-published 2001 political fanzine Quick; amid artist interviews are dense essays on anarcho-primitivism and the benefits of foraging for food and living off the grid.

“A lot of the songs from the first recordings Mike and Josh did had lyrics taken from this zine,” Abraham explains. “I was asked to join later on, and the band became almost two factions: Josh was really political—he was super-involved in [anti-poverty organization] OCAP—whereas I was at the height of being a reactionary, over-privileged hetero male coming out of the ‘90s.”

Upon Abraham’s arrival, Fucked Up’s fluid line-up solidified, with Haliechuk and Zucker’s twin-guitar roar anchored by Jonah Falco on drums and Sandy Miranda on bass. But despite their intensely activist hardcore origins, the band’s formative years were defined less by heart-on-sleeve proselytizing than deliberate contrarianism.