As Crown The Empire finishes their latest tour, this time with Hollywood Undead, they have a lot to prove. Despite being road warriors for the majority of their career, they’re finally ready to hunker down and get serious about their songwriting, something that’s alluded them over the years. 

“It’s hard to get that same edge and passion out of it when we’re just on tour,” singer Andy Velasquez says. “We’re rebuilding how we work as this band and treating it as a business and our actual career instead of just a fun thing. I have a lot of faith of how things are coming together right now.” 

While they were rolling through Canada earlier in the tour, we spoke with the singer, who told us about the band’s upcoming deluxe release of The Resistance, what the band has been recording and why their sound will be markedly different next time around. 

How has the tour been so far?

Great! This is our first tour that we’ve done outside of our safety bubble of the bands in our scene. We saw an opportunity while we were making new music to try to branch out and do something different and take a risk. 

With the deluxe edition of The Resistance coming out, is there any new material on the horizon? If so, is this tour sort of an appetizer to hold fans over until that’s released? 

Definitely is. There’s a lot of behind the scenes stuff that goes on that I don’t really have a lot of say in. Whether the record label wants to push these things or what not. We have half an album finished sitting in California right now that we’re going to get right back to it as soon as this tour is done. We’ve been working on it for 12 weeks now. All of the new songs we’ve played on the tour have been going over really well. A lot of these people are a new demographic anyways, so it’s all new to them and it’s a good opportunity to try them out. 

What’s been going on in the studio? 

In the past, it’s been this testing process. Bands like us live and die on the road. We were on tour for 10 months at a time and we’d get a month every year and a half to go into the studio. We had a month for the first album, three for the second, and six for this one. This process has been a little bit different because we’re not going to Detroit or Long Island, which seem like weird places to record. We have a friend from North Carolina who just moved to L.A. and it’s completely different vibe on the creative process. For the first time in forever it feels like we actually have time to be creative instead of, “Oh God, let’s finish the song!” It’s a feeling that we haven’t been used to.

How many songs have been written versus recorded?

I’d say 10 instrumentals with four songs completely finished with vocals and three with little parts needed here and there.

What direction is the sound headed in?

We decided to branch out of our comfort zone. Beforehand, we didn’t have time to think and we’d create the music that everyone else was making. As far as music goes right now, a lot of people are afraid to be an up-and-coming rock band because it’s associated with, and I don’t mean to throw anyone under the bus, but like a Nickelback rock band. There are so many different things that people are trying to branch out and make genuine good songs instead of a lot of these bands that are just jumping on the bandwagon with the breakdowns and all of that stuff. We think we’re moving in the right direction and focusing on the songs themselves versus it being heavy for the sake of being heavy. I think the album is coming together and moving in the right direction, which is an alternative rock vibe now. It’s Muse-influenced and a lot of 30 Seconds to Mars. We’re still trying to figure out what that is. The biggest difference with this album is that we’re starting from scratch and building from the bottom up instead of making songs for the sake of making songs. 

Why didn’t the six songs on the deluxe edition make the cut on the original edition? 

A lot of them are just reimagined version of the ones on the album already. The two new ones we decided to put on there because they bridged the gap between the sound we had before and taking the best elements of ourselves and actually making good, good songs. We didn’t want anyone to feel like they were getting ripped off and thinking they had less music and we wanted to give them something brand new. We picked the best ones that were finished out of there and it worked perfectly I think.