Chevelle’s run of dates this April will be an opportunity to see the Chicago-area band play shows with a few twists in the set lists.
Without a new album to promote, Chevelle plans to take a few liberties with the song selection, although drummer Sam Loeffler said the band won’t lose sight of what fans want to hear in crafting the show.
“We’re actually working on some covers because that’s fun for us to do,” Loeffler said, whose band plays the Pima County Fair on Friday, April 19.
“But it’s difficult to come up with a cover because we don’t want to do the same thing everybody else has done. We don’t want to do anything too obscure that you’re the only one who enjoys it, either. So it’s definitely a fine line. But (we’re playing) some deep cuts, some hits and stuff we haven’t done (live) in a long time. I think there’s a fine line there, too, between playing music that you want to play and doing music that people recognize and want to hear, not just all deep cuts.”
Those plans noted, this sort of a song set wasn’t what Chevelle originally intended for by this point.
“If everything had worked out really well, we’d have a new album out right now (to promote),” Loeffler said.
Loeffler, his brother, singer/guitarist/songwriter Pete Loeffler, and touring bassist Kemble Walters have spent a good deal of time in their studio and have the next album nearing the finish line.
“A lot of it’s done. But as we’ve been going, we’ve just been having new songs, and we’re like should we finish this next one?” Loeffler said. “We keep coming up with new stuff and new parts and things. That’s kind of when you get a little bit spoiled for choice when you have the ability to work in your own studio. But we have spent a bunch of time recording a bunch of finished stuff.”
The next album will be Chevelle’s first release under a new deal with indie label Alchemy Records after releasing eight albums on major label Epic Records. The band’s sound fell between rock genres, more melodic and not heavy enough to be considered metal, yet harder rocking than most alternative rock acts.
That nearly two-decade run on Epic saw some decidedly high points, especially early on.
After releasing its first studio album, “Point #1” in 1999 on the small label Squint Records, Chevelle signed to Epic. The band’s first album for the label, 2002’s “Wonder What’s Next,” put the group on the rock music map in a big way. Featuring the hit singles “The Red” and “Send The Pain Below,” the album sold more than one million copies.
The 2004 release “This Type Of Thinking (Could Do Us In),” came next and went gold while producing two more rock radio hits, “Vitamin R (Leading Us Along)” and “The Clincher.” The six albums that followed didn’t match the sales of those first two major label albums. But they achieved solid success, with 2014’s “La Gargola” becoming the band’s highest charting album when it peaked at No. 3 on Billboard magazine’s all-genre Top 200 album chart. That album, as well as 2009’s “Sci-Fi Crimes,” 2016’s “The North Corridor” and 2021’s “NIRATIAS” all topped Billboard’s Alternative Rock album charts, and all eight albums contributed hit songs to Chevelle’s current career total of 16 top-10 singles.
But while on Epic, the label went through multiple different regimes, and eventually the Loefflers felt their band became less of a priority at the label.
“I think as things went on, we had some people that we worked with for a long time, but there was so much change and turnover for people and the industry changed so much that it’s hard for people to come into a new job and attach themselves to somebody else’s project,” Loeffler said. “That was a struggle for us. We had a couple of people there that are still friends of ours, but it was weird how at the end there, we weren’t even able to get the president of our label on the phone. Yeah, she wouldn’t call back.”
There are no such issues at Alchemy.
“At Alchemy, we really work with basically four main people. And it’s going great because they’re all attached, not just to the (album) project, but to the label. So everybody has skin in the game and they’re not signing things that they don’t want to be part of,” Loeffler said. “They’re all working on stuff they want to work on. And I definitely see the difference.
“It’s not like this big thing (at Epic) where you have to take this special elevator up to the top floor and wait for somebody to do something and smell a certain candle or bring a frigging offering of artisanal water or something,” the drummer said. “It did really feel like that (at Epic) a lot of times at a certain level. Of course, the people you had to work with every day were great. But once you had to go up to the top level, it was always this big to-do thing. And it just (felt) very, very disconnected.”
With the new chapter of Chevelle’s career now underway, there have been other changes to go with the new record deal. Loeffler said the band is now managing itself, and for the first time in their career, they are self-producing the next album.
So far, the band’s long-time producer, Joe Barresi, has only had limited involvement in the project.
“We’ve run some stuff by him,” Loeffler said, noting the band members remain good friends with Barresi. “But we really wanted to try doing it in our own studio. So we’re doing that. I don’t know if we’ll finish the whole record in our studio or if we’ll go back and do some other stuff somewhere else. That’s possible, too. But right now it’s just working in our own studio and coming up with ideas and all that. And I think Joe is a proponent of that.”
Although some things could still change, the songs that at this point have made the cut for the next album, Loeffler said the needle is pointing in a heavier musical direction compared to “NIRATIAS,” which was a bit more melodic than some Chevelle albums.
“The music on this record is pretty heavy, so much so that when we put it all together (initially), we were like ‘Wow, this is a really, really hard record.’ So maybe we need to pull a couple of these songs back and use them for the next record and put a little bit more melody on it,” Loeffler said.
Whatever musical form the next album takes, one thing fans can expect is that Chevelle will have put plenty of thought, time and effort into the music.
“I think we’ve been putting out music that, I think it matters, all this time,” Loeffler said. “That’s been really the key to our career is we’re not just nonchalanting albums and putting them out. We never have. It’s always been important. It’s always been about the music.”
Chevelle
WHEN: 8 p.m. Friday, April 19
WHERE: Pima County Fair, 11300 S. Houghton Road, Tucson
COST: Free with admission; upgraded tickets are sold out
INFO: www.etix.com
