Holding the physical pressing of *Our Bande Apart*, you can feel the grit of a band that refused to let a global shutdown turn them into a heritage act. Most groups from the 1990s spent the lockdown period curate-ing anniversary box sets or selling off their publishing rights. Third Eye Blind did the opposite. They got weird, they got cinematic, and they got closer.
The album is a sharp, jagged response to the isolation of 2020. It is less a collection of songs and more a document of survival. Guitarist Kryz Reid, the man who has spent the last decade-plus refining the band’s sonic architecture, sees the record as a definitive statement of unity. It is a middle finger to the distance that threatened to dissolve the industry.
When I caught up with Reid, the conversation turned immediately to the record's title, which signals a pivot toward the high-brow. It is a cheeky nod to Jean-Luc Godard’s 1964 film *Bande à part*.
"I think the title is a homage to Jean-Luc Godard," Reid says. "We took a lot of inspiration aesthetically from the artwork to do that. The video for our single 'Goodbye to the Days of Ladies and Gentlemen', the video there is a direct homage to Godard."
But it is not just about the name. The band went deep on the physical experience of the music, leaning into a tactile, analog gimmick that feels refreshing in a world of digital streaming. They decided to include a zoetrope—an early animation device—within the packaging.
Reid describes the visual component as a bridge between the music and the listener's physical space. "It’s a still, like an animated sequence from one of the music videos. The CDs, we just saw them actually the other day and the CDs have zoetrope inside it. So you take the zoetrope and tape the ends together and put it onto your turntable or your record player and turn it on, it will animate that sequence."
It is a clever bit of engineering. In an era where the CD is often treated as a coaster, Third Eye Blind is trying to make the format interactive again.
"It looks quite awesome," Reid adds with a nonchalance that belies the technical effort involved.
The origin of the zoetrope was less of a corporate marketing meeting and more of a back-stage brainstorm. It highlights the DIY ethos that still permeates the band’s inner circle.
"I think we’re just playing around with those ideas when we were talking about the art for the record," Reid says. "I think it was Danny, maybe that heard about the idea, he’s one of our techs. I think he did the drawing, and it was just this little zoetrope idea. Then it was like Oh, we’ve put it into this record and you can actually put it on the turntable little spin around and make them dance."
And dancing is exactly what the band needed after months of stagnant isolation. The reunion of the group in West Hollywood was less a business meeting and more a spiritual necessity. They stripped away the stadium-sized production and focused on the core of the songwriting.
"Yeah, you said it, it was great," Reid says. "It was a long period of anticipation and when we got together in West Hollywood and started doing rehearsals for the new record, we just had this idea that we’d all just sit around a campfire, and play acoustic guitars and the vocal would be the most important part of the whole thing. It was nice to really just talk to each other and not shouting over loud drums and the bass player won’t stop playing, that kind of stuff. It was great to get together and just hang out and it was like band practices."
For a band that has spent years on the road, the shift to a domestic, local vibe was a change of pace. The geography of the band has shifted, too. The San Francisco roots are still there, but the gravity has moved south.
"We all live in Los Angeles now, except Stephan, he’s the one holdout, he’s still back in San Francisco," Reid says. "He basically moved to L.A. for three months, and we just went to this house in Hollywood. We did a bunch of rehearsals there for a few weeks. It was kind of like, a Tuesday night band practice, we all get together. It was like just being in a band with your mates from school."
But the road to this "school mates" vibe was paved with the trauma of a tour that died before it could even breathe. On March 11, the world stopped. Third Eye Blind was right in the crosshairs.
"I think it was kind of both of those things, maybe our mindset was a little different, coming out of pandemics to get into this one because we’re all in isolation," Reid says. "Essentially, Stephan and I will do some work together in San Francisco. An acoustic special and stuff like that, and then making videos for them, for our podcasts. So we’re staying pretty active, but when we all got together and we did a couple of those shows where everybody’s in a car. You’re in a big car park and it’s kind of crazy. So yeah, we all got back together."
The relief of finally being in the same room was tempered by the memory of the Seattle shutdown. It is a story that has become legend in the band’s history.
We were right at the epicenter, we were at ground zero, we were in Seattle... It was like, we’re playing the show tonight. Then the governor’s making it an announcement at 11. It was like, shows canceled... And when we woke up in the morning in Portland, it was like, tour is canceled. ...we didn’t even get to play one show.
"It was just this massive outpouring of relief and we all felt like it was a new day," Reid says. "I remember Brad our drummer has always said ‘You never know when your last show was going to be.’ He said, ‘My last show is going to be good’. It’s this idea of always keeping your chops up, always staying on top of your game and being the best at your instrument that you can be and it was just interesting because we were just on the cusp of a massive tour when COVID-19 came along."
The timing could not have been worse. They were at the starting line, engines revving, only for the track to be dismantled in front of them.
"We had to halt all of our production, we were right at the epicenter, we were at ground zero, we were in Seattle, and we’d flown in after two weeks of pre-production in Las Vegas," Reid says. "A lot of bands have their stuff cancelled, but we were right on the day. It was like, we’re playing the show tonight. Then the governor’s making it an announcement at 11. It was like, shows cancelled we got on our tour buses, and we drove to Portland. And when we woke up in the morning in Portland, it was like, tour is cancelled. So everybody had their stuff cancelled. We were at the 11th hour, we’re all at their full production, full band and crew and we didn’t even get to play one show."
Reid didn't just sit around and wait for the world to reopen. He co-directed a documentary to capture the making of the album, ensuring the struggle was preserved.
"We were doing things a little bit differently and I document everything we do anyway," Reid says. "But Stephan was like, for this one, maybe you should make an actual half hour documentary recording of this album, because we had a different kind of mindset coming into it, it wasn’t going to be the same way that we normally work, we just have this idea that we would do little band practices."
The documentary pulls back the curtain on a recording process that favoured the organic over the artificial. In a genre often plagued by over-production and Pro Tools perfection, Third Eye Blind opted for the raw.
"Then we just go into the studio and play together, recording everything live, and we’re just going to get through it," Reid says. "Move in a more organic fashion as opposed to people recording records, they do things differently as a lot of computers evolved. A lot of people put a lot of manipulation stuff into it and we don’t really do that. So we kind of felt like, we could document this and people get to see how you actually work behind the scenes as opposed to just the veneer of the finished product."
This approach was a departure from their previous effort, *Screamer*. That record was born in the desert, under different pressures and a different creative sun.
"Screamer was more conventional in that we went to Sonic Ranch in El Paso, Texas," Reid says. "We live down on that ranch for an extended period of time while we’re working on that record. Conceptually, I think it started the same way. They both started the same way. But the difference was that Stephan had more songs completed when we went to start work on Our Bande Apart, as opposed to a Screamer which was a little bit more of stuff being done in the studio."
The band also experimented with remote production during the height of the lockdown, most notably on "So Alone, So Alive." It was a technical headache that Reid had to manage from his own headquarters.
"I produced that, it was actually a lot of tech involved because the idea was to have a live broadcast, but we were all in isolation," Reid says. "Stephan was out in San Francisco, Brad was in Los Angeles, Colin our bass player lives in Seattle. So the idea was to have this satellite link up and we’ll all play the songs together. And that’s the video that I produced, where we just spoke to each other through the thing and you watched it."
The challenge was making a disjointed, digital interaction look like a cohesive musical performance. It required a level of editing finesse that Reid is proud of.
"I just got the guys to hook up their phones and cameras and send it to me," Reid says. "I put it all together at Mastermind Hq in San Francisco. So it looks like it was a live simulcast broadcast with several different parts of the United States. We had somebody over in New York from Sleigh Bells that did a bit of track on that as well. So if it looks like that live broadcast then I’ve done my job."
One of the standout tracks on the new record is "Again," a song that leans heavily into the shoegaze aesthetic. It features Beth Cosentino of Best Coast, adding a layer of California cool to the band's wall of sound.
" 'Again' is a straight up shoe gazer, a duet with Beth from Best Coast," Reid says. "I think it was the first song Stephan played me from the new batch he had written for this record."
The recording sessions were defined by a specific mantra that kept the band focused on that hazy, atmospheric guitar tone.
"When we were jamming it, we came up with the phrase 'Keep it Gaze' which we’d say ad nauseam throughout the recording of the album actually," Reid says.
The music videos for the album have also taken an artistic, often band-less approach. But Reid is quick to point out that they aren't entirely absent from the visual narrative.
"Stephan is in the Box of Bones video, maybe you missed him in it! We’re all in the Dying Blood video, Cavy will be making his debut as the star of the Silverlake Neophyte video I’m directing," Reid says.
The decision to stay off-screen or use alternative visuals was driven by the art, not just the restrictions of the pandemic.
"We didn’t make a conscious decision to not be in the videos, we just had the idea that we’d make videos for all the tracks on the new record," Reid says. "We’d float different ideas for each song and pick what we felt was best. If we’d come up with better ideas that had us IN the video, maybe we’d be more visible, but I think there’s a good mix for this record."
One of the most surprising turns for the band was their tribute to the late Eddie Van Halen. For Reid, a guitarist who grew up outside the cult of the shredder, learning "Ain't Talkin' 'Bout Love" was an unexpected education.
"Honestly, I was not at all interested in guitar players like Eddie or Steve Vai, Yngwie Malmsteen or any of those guys when I started playing guitar," Reid says. "I hated that guitar tone, the constant smiling all the time, it all just seemed like a card trick to me."
Reid’s tastes were always more grounded, favouring texture and melody over the athletic displays of the 1980s.
"I’d watch a video of one of those guys doing their thing and go 'Oh...neat.' I just had zero emotional response to all that stuff," Reid says. "So I was far more drawn to guitar players who were less show offs. It wasn’t until much much later that I got a little more perspective on Eddie’s playing. So I had to go learn 'Ain’t Talkin’ Bout Love' when we decided to do it as tribute after Eddie died."
The process of deconstructing Van Halen’s work changed Reid’s perspective on the legend. He found a depth that he had previously dismissed as flashy nonsense.
"I remember thinking oh, I have to go learn some insane guitar card trick now, but when I sat down with it, I found it melodically interesting, and really not some insanely dexterous nonsense, which is what I expected. Now I like Van Halen," Reid says.
Since Reid joined the lineup in 2010, Third Eye Blind has been on a creative tear. They have released more music in the last decade than they did in the decade prior. Reid attributes this to the band finally finding its permanent pulse.
"I think we are a band now," Reid says. "That sounds like a pretty simple answer, but when I joined the band we had a different bass player and there were a bunch of songs already written for the next record. We went on tour, we’d record at different studios, we changed bass players a couple of times. When we went to London to record with Martin Terefe, we didn’t even have a bass player!"
The road to *Dopamine* was long and fractured, but the arrival of bassist Alex LeCavalier (Cavy) solidified the foundation.
"So Dopamine took six years to make, and I felt like we weren’t a very cohesive unit back then," Reid says. "After Cavy joined, I feel like we gelled more. And so we started working more. We recorded We Are Drugs the next year and we’ve been pushing since. There’s a lot to do, you know?"
With *Our Bande Apart*, Third Eye Blind has proven that they aren't just surviving; they are evolving. The album is a testament to what happens when a group of musicians stops worrying about the "veneer" and starts focusing on the campfire. For tour dates, music and more go to thirdeyeblind.com.
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