Incubus has only been off the road for a month since wrapping its 2022 tour with a sold-out show at Red Rocks outside Denver, but the long-running rock outfit is already looking ahead to next year. Frontman Brandon Boyd tells SPIN that group members got together last week in California to “jam out,” and that “if all goes according to plan, there’ll be some new music coming from us before we hit the road again in January.”
For now, Incubus’ only announced 2023 dates are a four-show run starting Jan. 31 in Corpus Christi, Texas, and a May 13 appearance at the inaugural Sick New World festival in Las Vegas alongside fellow 2000s-era cohorts System of a Down, Korn, Deftones, and many more. However, the group will also have a strong international touring presence next year, with details still being finalized.
“There’s no shortage of things to write about,” Boyd says, referencing the world-changing events that have taken place in the nearly six years since Incubus’ last studio album, 8. “So I’m kind of chomping at the bit, if I’m being honest. I’m almost at the point where I’m text begging, like, ‘Please! Meet me in the band room!'”
And while Incubus did release a five-song EP, Trust Fall (Side B) in the spring of 2020, and Boyd unveiled a solo album, Echoes & Cocoons, in March, the vocalist admits, “there’s nothing like writing music with the dudes you grew up with. It’s special.”
“It’s such a wild thing,” he continues. “Everybody in the band is partnered up and/or married. We’re all squarely in our mid-40s. [Guitarist] Mikey [Einziger] and [drummer] José [Pasillas] both have kids. My girlfriend and I are in that phase of our relationship where we’re like, it’s time to start a family. It’s going to be an interesting phase four of Incubus for us, to all have kids at some point. I’m assuming that the music is going to slow down dramatically, but it might be quite the opposite. It might be like, ‘Oh, God! I’ve got to get out of the house! Let’s go write songs together!'”
Incubus’ Red Rocks show included a partnership with PORTAL (Partnership of Responsible Trippers Advocating Legalization), a cause vertical within the website of leading music-driven social impact organization Propeller. Boyd is a vocal advocate for the therapeutic benefits of psychedelics and is constantly reading up on the latest developments within the scene, although he concedes it has been 12 years since his last “heroic dose experience.”
“Since then, it has been more of an occasional micro-dose thing,” he says. “It definitely has an effect on one’s creativity, at least mine. There’s a bio-chemical response to psilocybin and likely LSD as well, and this understanding is relatively new to me.” Referencing Iain McGilchrist’s 2021 book The Matter With Things, Boyd says psychedelics carefully taken in the right setting “can usher in moments of unfettered, unfiltered creativity. Over time, you learn to invoke those states on your own, unaided. Sometimes coffee will do that for me now. Sometimes the right time of day or the right environment will do that for me. I do believe that having early experiences as a kid with psychedelics taught me how to access that state, which I’m super thankful for.”
