Sometimes doing everything you can, in the best way you know how, that can feel like lonely work. “Integrity Blues” is one of my favorite songs that I’ve ever written. If you’re unwilling to open up and say yes to things that might seem scary, then you’re just missing out on so much. The first single, “Sure and Certain,” sums up the idea that if you’re cruising with blinders on and are just goal-driven, it’s limiting because you’re missing out on what’s immediately around you. Personally, where I am in life right now mirrors that sentiment of just starting to say yes to stuff and having no idea where those things are going to take you, and it’s exciting. But then we thought, “Why?” So one of the things we did after we stopped touring last time around was that instead of going to the studio to crank something out, we decided to take a year off from anything band-related, which was something we hadn’t done in like 20 years. When we got off touring for our last big cycle for Damage and then did shows for the 10th anniversary of the our Futures record, the first thing we wanted to do was get right in and start working. How did that strategy play out in the recording process?

There’s nothing good about feeling comfortable. You’re afraid to break out of this familiarity. All those things pushed us away from the zone of comfort, because really the zone of comfort is a zone of fear. So for this record, we purposely wanted to work with someone we’ve never worked with and make a record in a way that we haven’t made one in a while. So we really had to check ourselves and ask, “Is this the best, most effective way to get this thing to happen, or is it just something that we’re comfortable with?” Maybe there’s a different way. We have this sort of shorthand communication as a band because we all know all our strengths. If we run into a musical problem, say you want a certain part of a song to feel a certain way, without even talking about it we can just execute it because we’re a team and we know our strengths and we’ve done it before. How did you work on shaking things up on this album? During a recent interview with Rolling Stone, Adkins discussed Jimmy Eat World’s fresh approach to recording, moving beyond “finish-line-type goals” and embracing his inner metalhead.

Jimmy eat world albums in order