JAMISON, PA.- “So, who’s the pig lover here?”

Wandering the grounds of Ross Mill Farm, a foster home and boarding spot for porcine pets about an hour outside Philadelphia, the four members of the band Mannequin Pussy answered the facility’s owner nearly in unison: “We all are!”

Pigs are pack animals — not so different from being in a touring rock band, singer and guitarist Marisa Dabice, 36, noted playfully. Maxine Steen, 34, who plays synths and guitar, felt an instant kinship with a hesitant hog named Max, proclaiming them both “so aloof.” The band, which also includes drummer Kaleen Reading, 31, and bassist Colins Regisford, 37, known as Bear, has been spotted with livestock a lot lately. In two of its recent music videos, the quartet cavorts with cows and sheep, and a pig features prominently on the cover of its fierce new album, “I Got Heaven.”

Mannequin Pussy’s earliest releases were a fuzzy punk squall, but in its more than 10-year-run, its music has come to incorporate shoegazey swirls of sound, sharp hooks and intimate moments of vulnerability. The band reached a turning point in 2019 with “Patience,” an album that struck a balance between its more savage and tender sides. The coronavirus pandemic subsequently halted its touring plans, but not its momentum.

In 2021, a fictional act performed the group’s songs in the Pennsylvania-centric HBO show “Mare of Easttown,” and the band was featured in the comic book series “Witchblood.” “I feel like it’s rare to say this,” Dabice said, “but we got a little lucky with the pandemic.” The band capitalized on the chance to catch its breath while still finding new listeners, and returns Friday with “I Got Heaven,” a striking collection of songs about desire, control and resilience.

“There’s this sultry ferocity that feels very unique to them,” Michelle Zauner, who records as Japanese Breakfast and has been a fan since the band’s earliest days, said in an email. “But they’ve also got a wonderful knack for melody and real lyrical depth.”

Dabice first started playing guitar as a teenager in Connecticut, a place with “such a preppy Stepford Wife culture,” she said, “that if you are the least bit alternative, you’re going to be made to feel like a freak.” She escaped into the sounds of rock stalwarts like the Stooges and MC5 and punk acts like Piebald, skipping her high school prom to attend the Bonnaroo festival.

She paused playing while being treated for a rare form of cancer in high school, and didn’t return to music until after she had recovered and moved to Colorado for college. Living in a group house that hosted concerts in its kitchen, she was drawn to her friends’ punk approach — unsophisticated and deeply enthusiastic — and joined a short-lived band before learning bass to go on tour with indie-pop songwriter Colleen Green.

Shortly after Dabice graduated, she returned home to help care for her mother, who had suffered a stroke. Searching for a cathartic outlet, she got in touch with Athanasios Paul, a childhood friend and fellow musician, and the two started gigging around New York as a duo. “I didn’t go into it with the intention of wanting to make records,” she said. “I just wanted to play, and I just wanted to scream as loud as I possibly could.”

Dabice took the band’s name from an inside joke, and said she doesn’t regret that it has proved divisive; she believes being subversive and challenging is at the “core of what rock music is supposed to do.”

The band released a few chaotic EPs and relocated to Philadelphia, lured by cheaper rents and a vibrant DIY music scene. Before “Romantic,” its second album, from 2016, the group added Reading as its drummer; then, because “it’s pretty wild to be a guitar band with no bass,” Dabice said, Regisford joined.

Touring as much as possible, as thriftily as possibly, brought the band closer and reinforced its resourcefulness. The members would often screen-print shirts from Goodwill to sell as merch, then crash on friends’ floors and couches. (These days, they can afford the luxury of multiple hotel rooms, where, Dabice said with excitement, “Everyone’s getting a bed.”)

While they struggled but persevered as a unit, personally, Dabice was reeling after the end of an abusive relationship that provided some of the fuel for “Patience.” “I was really deeply ashamed that that could happen to me,” she said. “I have worked very hard to be someone who has a lot of confidence and doesn’t take [expletive] from people,” she added. “And then you find yourself in a situation where you no longer recognize yourself.”

“Patience” represented a creative and emotional leap, as well as a professional one. It was the band’s first release on the storied punk label Epitaph, which put out the “Punk-O-Rama” compilations Dabice had listened to growing up. “I Got Heaven” is the band’s first LP since Paul, her original creative partner, amicably left the band after some pandemic-inspired introspection, and its first with Steen.

The album’s producer, John Congleton, is a fellow pig-joke lover who has worked with Blondie, St. Vincent and Angel Olsen, among other artists. He fell in love with Mannequin Pussy’s music a few years ago, and his good friend, Epitaph founder and Bad Religion guitarist Brett Gurewitz, put him in touch.

“I like that they’re genuine weirdos,” Congleton said in a video interview. “They’re delightful and strange and funny and dangerous,” he added, “all the things that I think good punk should be.” His goal was to help the record “reflect that genuine mania and weirdness.”

The result is 10 tracks of defiant punk, buoyant power-pop and fuzzed-out rock anchored by Dabice’s bold, often confrontational lyrics. On searing tracks like “Of Her” and “Aching,” she screams about taking control and prioritizing her independence. On the dreamy “I Don’t Know You” and the yearning “Nothing Like,” she sings of being cautiously romantic.

Dabice started writing the album during her first prolonged period of being single as an adult, which spurred reflection on what romance was — and wasn’t — adding to her life. “For a long time, I was using relationships as a way to avoid myself, by merging myself with someone else,” she said. “‘I Got Heaven’ was really the first time in my adult life that I was standing very firmly in my own solitude.”

Dabice writes stirringly about desire in myriad forms, including its intersections with the holy. On the title track, she aims blistering verses and a sugary, soaring chorus at those who weaponize religion for control. “We’re in the pursuit of making art, and that’s our personal experience with the divine,” she said. “I feel like we have found this divine communion between the four of us and in the way that we invite people into this sacred collaboration.”

That sense of solidarity is meaningful for a woman-fronted group with Black and trans members in a historically white, male genre. The band provides a chance to “really broaden people’s conceptions of who belongs or who does not within music and within certain scenes,” Dabice said. “But I think we’re also held to a very different standard than some of our peers and contemporaries.” Regisford agreed. “I’ve been to a lot of shows where I was the only person of color there,” he said. “What I love is that, when I see our crowd now, it’s a rainbow of people.”

With a headlining tour supporting “I Got Heaven” coming up, the group is focused on an even further future. “Something we say a lot to each other,” Dabice said, “is that our best work is always ahead of us.” (“I want to be geriatric as heck onstage!” Steen declared, using a stronger word.)

But first, the tour of Ross Mill Farm wrapped up in a small nursery where piglets were ready and willing to cuddle. The four band members arranged themselves on the floor, shoulder to shoulder, as small pink creatures crawled into their laps. “I’m in heaven right now,” Steen said serenely, only half-joking, looking out over her bandmates and their new tiny friends. “I feel saved.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.