Incubus: "It feels like we're having fun again"

"We're thriving at the moment. We are undoubtedly in a much better, healthier place." Incubus singer Brandon Boyd is in a reflective mood as he opens up about the band's new album ‘8'. It's the Californians' first full-lengther in nearly six years, and it's a true return to rocked-up form, with the record juggling grunge-speckled riffs and Boyd's trademark melodious, lofty vocals. In a surprising team-up, Skrillex mixed the record and co-produced some of the tracks, but the collaboration was wholly unexpected. He was invited to Incubus' studio as they were mixing their eighth album, but Moore asked to head next door with the stems of one of the tracks. "My assumption was that he was going to do a remix that would appear on a B-side, or an extra on the album," Boyd says. "He didn't fundamentally alter the song in any earth-shattering way; he just made it sound…better. It was surprising, and it was eye-opening. Long story short, a few weeks later he had mixed the whole record again and co-produced a couple of the tracks. We thought we loved it to begin with, and then we fell even more deeply in love with this project." The vibes in the Incubus camp are most definitely bulging with happiness and hope right now, but it's fair to say it's not always quite been quite so rosy. The quintet were threatening to run out of steam after the release of their 2013 record ‘If Not Now, When?', and the momentum which had helped produce acclaimed back-catalogue notables like 'S.C.I.E.N.C.E.' and ‘Morning View' was seizing up. "I don't think we were ready to necessarily acknowledge it openly, but we were in a really dark period of our band when we were writing ‘If Not Now, When?', and through the process of touring that record as well," Boyd admits. "There was part of our band at the moment that was withering, and it was dying. We didn't know exactly what was happening, so we were kind of just going through the motions in some ways. "At the end of 2012, when we decided we were finished touring that record, we took a very much needed break. None of us stopped making music during that period, but we just weren't doing it together."