If I play this festival and all these bands are on it, am I only going to get these festival offers?” Once you decide to start playing those festivals, you sort of get lumped into that, so those are decisions you have to make. We’re not really that hardcore into that genre. We have a lot of ballads and slower stuff, and we don’t all wear black. That’s just kind of what they categorized us as and put us on those festivals in our younger age. “We spent a really long time trying to get out of that hole, the nu metal hole, I guess you could call it, because we’re not really a metal band. “If we say ‘yes’ to like an Ozzfest, that can end up putting us in that hole,” he says. More: Things to do this week in Cincinnati: May 30-June 3 And being a DJ, Kilmore is always keeping an eye out for the DJ tent. But if they sign on to play a festival, they’re looking for musical diversity in the lineup. He prefers when the band plays its own shows more than festival gigs, because the crowd is there chiefly to see Incubus. Because Incubus does not fit neatly into a particular musical category, Kilmore says it becomes critical how the band is packaged live. That collective songwriting approach informed the band’s eclectic sound of rock with prog and hip-hop touches. It was really special because I had the freedom to do whatever I wanted, and I got to write the whole record with them,” he says.

Mikey (Einziger) would have a guitar riff and Brandon (Boyd) would have a melody, and there were whole parts of songs where they would just leave it open, like a 16-bar break and be like, ‘Hey Kil, do whatever you want.’ The only thing I had recorded up until then were mixtapes and DJ gigs and things like that.

There were parts of it where we kind of integrated all of us all together. “We had toured for about a year before we wrote that record.

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