No Doubt’s Tony Kanal, Tom Dumont, and Adrian Young did a such an excellent job keeping Dreamcar — their new electro/pop/rock supergroup with AFI frontman Davey Havok — a secret, they’re not even sure if their old friend and bandmate Gwen Stefani has listened to their entire debut album, out May 12.

“I don’t know if she’s heard it yet, but I think she’s going to really like the record,” Kanal says with a smile. “I think it’s totally up her alley.”

Kanal and Havok are sitting with Yahoo Music in an office above the Roxy, the 500-capacity Sunset Strip club where they’re about to play their fourth-ever public show. It’s also Kanal’s first Roxy gig since 1991, when No Doubt was still a fledgling Orange County ska/pop-punk band. Fans of both AFI and No Doubt are already lined up on the sidewalk outside, hours before the Roxy’s doors open, and Kanal seems as excited as they are.

“It’s been a little while since Tom, Adrian, and myself have done intimate venues like this,” the peroxide-haired bassist reflects. “It’s been 26 years since we’ve been on that [Roxy] stage — which is awesome that we’re back here and playing it. Adrian was saying earlier that when we were playing these first live shows leading up to [Dreamcar’s album release], the Roxy was where he envisioned us.”

While the future of No Doubt remains unclear — its reunion album, Push and Shove, came out in 2012 after an 11-year hiatus, and Stefani has since busied herself with solo music, motherhood, The Voice, and a new high-profile romance with Voice co-star Blake Shelton — Kanal, who dated Stefani from 1987 to 1994 and inspired much of her lyrics for No Doubt’s breakthrough album Tragic Kingdom, stresses that Dreamcar isn’t a replacement for his iconic old group.

Related: Tony Kanal Gets Nostalgic in Video Marking 30th Anniversary in No Doubt

“No, definitely not,” he states. “Of course we would never say that. No Doubt is a very specific thing that’s comprised of Tom and Adrian and myself and Gwen, and it will always be that way. This is obviously a brand-new project, a brand-new band for us.

“Tom, Adrian and myself wanted to keep playing music,” Kanal explains. “We love playing together. We wanted to continue to do so, and it wasn’t about going and finding a singer. I think that wouldn’t have done justice to what we want to create. It had to be the right person, had to kind of come onto our radar — and Davey was that person.”

Dreamcar (Photo: Steve Erle)

While the No Doubt guys had been musically dormant for a minute, the same could not be said for Havok, who was recording his recently released 10th full-length effort with AFI, The Blood Album, while simultaneously “working in secrecy for two years” with Dreamcar, and he’ll be touring with both Dreamcar and AFI throughout 2017. The tireless rock star’s other side-projects (with AFI’s Jade Puget) include the hardcore band XTRMST, whose debut album came out in 2014, and the electronic duo Blaqk Audio, whose third album dropped last year.

Related: AFI on Their Discography, Being Proudly Polarizing, and Why ‘Female Fans Have the Best Taste in Music’

“The one thing that people may not know about Davey is that he is extremely prolific, and he is constantly working on art… Davey’s doing so much all the time, but when he’s with you, he’s 1,000 percent committed,” Kanal gushes while Havok blushes. “He’s there in the moment. There’s nothing else that’s happening except for what’s in front of him. And it’s just this amazing, powerful force, creative force to be in the room with, to be working with, to be writing with.”

“It’s fun,” shrugs Havok modestly. “I mean, I’m so lucky to have that opportunity, to be able to express myself in different artistic formats, musically speaking — and actually beyond music — and have people care about what I do. So I’m very privileged, and since I have the opportunity, I try to take it if I can. I mean, I might be dead soon.”

Death jokes aside, Havok leads a healthy lifestyle that should afford him a long career. It was in fact a shared practice of veganism that first bonded Havok with Kanal, and eventually Kanal, Dumont, and Young “asked him on a date” to the Los Angeles vegan eatery Crossroads Kitchen. The rest was history, and the actual table where the four musicians had their first meeting about forming Dreamcar was later featured in the colorful video for their first single, “Kill for Candy.”

What makes the Dreamcar project so surprising — besides the band’s ability to keep such a superstar collaboration under wraps for so long in an era of social-media oversharing and lurking paparazzi — is that it in fact sounds almost nothing like either No Doubt or AFI. While those acts that got their start in the alt-rock ’90s, Dreamcar are pure big-’80s New Romanticism — all jangle-funk ragged-tiger guitars, slapped bass, hyperspeed synths, cheeky Blitz Kid posturing, Ant-rapping, Bow Wow Wow beats, and even a couple saxophone solos that wouldn’t be out of place on an INXS or Spandau Ballet album. Dreamcar basically sounds like a great lost Duran Duran album. However, Havok and Kanal insist that they didn’t set out to make new wave sound new all over again when they recorded their self-titled debut.

“There were no direct influences for us when we were writing,” Havok says. “It wasn’t our intention to look back. We weren’t sitting down and listening to [Adam & the Ants’] Kings of the Wild Frontier or [ABC’s] The Lexicon of Love or [Talk Talk’s] The Party’s Over. It just naturally came out of us. And as it continued to organically happen, it really fed upon itself and recreated the record that you hear.

“And it’s very natural for all of us to go in that direction as — I believe I speak for all of us — to at least some extent we were raised on that music,” Havok continues, citing My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult, the Virgin Prunes, King of “Love and Pride” fame, and Duran Duran as his own ’80s influences.

Kanal adds: “Obviously the Cure [was an influence]. Obviously Depeche Mode. For me, Prince, not in that same world, but was the biggest for me, and the most influential for me in so many weird, different ways. There’s so many different things, but like Davey said, those points of reference only came later. They were never discussed in the moment or in the creative process. This was just us being free to create with no expectations, with nobody else knowing that we were even working on music. And that’s a beautiful place to be. You don’t get that opportunity often to press the reset button, get in a studio, and just be free and creative. I think that’s such a special thing to happen.”

Just as it remains to be seen if No Doubt will record more music in the future, Kanal isn’t yet sure if Dreamcar will be a long-term project . But for now, he and Havok are enjoying the Dreamcar ride.

Related: Gwen Stefani: ‘I’m in a Real Spiritual Phase in My Life’

“I think if there’s one thing that the history of No Doubt has afforded us, it’s our opportunity to go and do different creative things, and I think we would be remiss not to explore different avenues. This is a really great place for us to be, and I think we’ve earned it. We’ve been together as a band for 30 years, so you don’t want to do the same thing over and over,” asserts Kanal. “For us, it was very much about trying something new, and I’m so glad we did, because I’m so proud of this Dreamcar record. I always say this: I don’t listen to stuff I’ve worked on when I’m driving in the car. And this is one of the rare exceptions. I’ll get in the car, and I’ll listen to our record, because I really, really love the way it turned out.”

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This article originally ran on Yahoo Music.

“We’ve always been a polarizing band,” AFI frontman Davey Havok admits, as he and his bandmates Jade Puget (guitar), Adam Carson (drums), and Hunter Burgan (bass) sit down with Yahoo Music to reflect on AFI’s wide-ranging discography. But Havok recalls a time, right around the release of 2000’s Art of Drowning, when there was a “shift in the male-female ratio” of AFI’s audience. And AFI — who formed in 1991 amid NoCal’s testosterone-soaked punk scene, and issued their early albums on Offspring singer Dexter Holland’s Nitro Records — were absolutely thrilled about that.

“It’s cool when it’s weighted towards the female, because from what I’ve known growing up, ladies always have the best taste in music,” Havok asserts with a grin.

“We used to only play to men,” the famously androgynous Havok continues. “Up until [1997’s] Shut Your Mouth…, we were playing to, like, seven people a night. Two people a night. No people a night. Twenty people a night. Fifty people a night. … Up until Jade and Hunter joined the band, really, the crowds were mostly male. And then more women started showing up, and I would say it remained half and half at least from there out, if not weighted towards the female.”

“If you’re only playing to guys, you’ll only be this size,” adds Puget. “You have to appeal to everyone.”

Of course, as Havok notes, AFI, whose sound has riskily and wildly fluctuated from hardcore punk to synthy darkwave to stomping glam-pop, haven’t always appealed to everyone. And they’re totally OK with that too.

“We’ve been polarizing for different reasons. For one thing, my voice is very polarizing. It sits in this place that either appeals to people or really puts people off. I can understand that,” says Havok, who reveals that he used to hold a rag while recording his vocals to prevent his hands from bleeding. (“I clench when I’m screaming, and for a long period of my life, I had very long nails that were far more fabulous than they are now. Having long nails and clenching that hard will dig holes in your hands.”)

“In addition to that, our sound [in the early days], and what we were inspired by, wasn’t really en vogue in the community we were playing in,” Havok continues. “There were all sorts of different types of alternative music, and punk and hardcore, but not really what we were doing was happening. So we were asking a lot of people to come and enjoy this, because it really wasn’t what was going on.”

Havok recalls with a chuckle when AFI made their first music video, for “He Who Laughs Last” off 1996’s Very Proud of Ya. “We did a free show at Berkeley Square, and it was known that it was a video shoot, and to flier it we offered free pizza and soda. … There were probably 250 people who showed up, with 150 hardcore kids in the front, as can be seen in the video. And in the back were a hundred crust-punks eating free pizza, who hated our band and loved free food.” (“I was one of those,” jokes Puget, who was in a rival Bay Area band at the time.) Havok also remembers when a batch of Very Proud of Ya promo posters was shipped to Berkeley’s fabled punk club Gilman St. “Because we had signed to a larger indie [Nitro] … someone had made a big dollar sign out of it, up on the wall of our posters, because we had ‘sold out.’”

But with their ambition and vision, AFI were always destined for big things beyond Berkeley, even if they started off cohabitating in a squalid squat, with Puget, who officially joined the band in 1998, living in a “clayvit” in Havok’s bedroom. “We called it a clayvit because it was a combination of a closet and a cave,” Puget explains. “I had just graduated college, and I didn’t know what I was going to do. I had no real plans … I didn’t have any money because I was obviously broke. And [the band was] like, ‘If you’re going to be a band member full time, like, you can’t have a job,’ so they got Dexter Holland to send me a thousand dollars. So I got this $1,000 check, and I’d never gotten a check that had like four digits on it. I was like, ‘Oh, my God! This is the rock star life? Thousand-dollar checks just arriving in the mail?’ So I felt like, ‘This is it, a life of leisure! I got this thousand dollars in the bank, I’ll just live indefinitely on that.’ And we really could, because our rent was like $150 a month or something.”

AFI eventually “sold out” even more when they signed to DreamWorks; released their landmark album, the Butch Vig-co-produced Sing the Sorrow; and finally moved out of their squat. (“I moved to a shabby apartment down the street, but it was still my own place. I had my own bathroom, there wasn’t mold, or like rats or cockroaches or anything like that,” says Puget.) But this was a natural, gradual, dues-paying progression, not some overnight success story. “That’s pretty rare — how many bands have their mainstream breakout after 12 years?” says Puget.

Adds Carson: “The scene that we came from, and just our mentalities in general, there was never a fixation on success. We were successful every step of the way, [whether] we were making 500 copies of a 7-inch record, which was wildly exciting, or playing the smallest show in the world, which seemed exciting as well, going on tour. We had this sense of accomplishment and success every step of the way. So when finally some sort of mainstream attention was being directed towards us, it was exciting, but it never really was what we were actively seeking.”

Whether they’d sought it out or not, AFI were in the big leagues now, and that came with its pros and cons. “Up until Sing the Sorrow, we didn’t really have success, so it was easy — there were no expectations on us, and writing all that stuff was very simple and very organic,” says Puget. “And after Sing the Sorrow, it’s like, we gotta follow up this record that went gold — and went platinum later. And we were on Interscope [which had recently purchased DreamWorks] now. Interscope was the biggest label in the world, and we had to deliver something. While we didn’t want to sit there and try to write a hit, because that never works, we felt like, ‘We have to do something great, and we have to do something better than the last record.’”

The recording process for Sing the Sorrow’s follow-up, Decemberunderground, was further proof that AFI were a long way from the humble Nitro days when they’d rehearse in Havok’s parents’ living room and record their albums in less than a week. “We went with [producer] Jerry Finn up to this farm in Northern California to do preproduction. They wanted us to go stay on this shabby farm; it was such a bummer,” laughs Puget.

“Our A&R guy had this fantasy from all the old rock records, of people going to the South of France or going to Jamaica and immersing, just getting away. And we’re not those people,” says Havok.

“Like when [the Rolling Stones] made Exile on Main Street in a chateau in France — that was his idea,” says Puget. “You know, if you were going to put us in a chateau, maybe that would have worked…”

“There was cat hair everywhere,” recalls Carson of the farm.

“And chickens! And spiders,” adds Havok. “I remember when we pulled up, and none of us wanted to do it in the first place. I got lost, and I pulled into a gas station, and there was a chicken at the gas station. Just walking through the gas station. I wanted to turn around and go back home.”

“But we really dug in on that and started honing this off with Jerry. And that’s part of what the songs really started to take shape and actually become a record. And it started being fun instead of just painful,” says Puget.

The result was 2006’s lush and ambitious Decemberunderground. The album spawned the massive alt-rock smash “Miss Murder” (which, incredibly, almost didn’t make the tracklisting; the band still doesn’t think it’s a great song), debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard chart, and eventually went platinum. But it solidified AFI’s reputation as a “Goth punk” band, a tag that had stuck with them since their 1999 release, Black Sails in the Sunset, and that never sat well with the guys.

“I think it was kind of a backhanded insult. Like, ‘Look at these guys, they’re all Gothy, trying to play punk,’” gripes Puget. “So it was an almost derogatory thing. … [That tag] kind of dogged us for, like, 10 years.”

The band’s next release, the more straightforwardly rocking and guitar-centric Crash Love, was a bit of a reaction to Decemberunderground and the whole “Goth punk” thing, but unfortunately, the album was a commercial letdown. “Our goal is always to make records we’re proud of, and as long as we like it, it doesn’t matter how they perform,” says Carson. “But it is kind of disheartening when the week of the album’s release, people come up and wonder, ‘Are you guys making a new record anytime soon?’”

“When Crash Love came out, the single didn’t perform, and MTV was playing even less videos than ever before, with us not included in that,” says Havok. “And so it was great because the fans that did hear it went way out of their way to get it and were really excited about it, but there were far fewer people exposed to Crash Love than the previous album. On the tour, people would come to the record signing and ask why we were in town. We even had two girls in fan club shirts do that.”

“On a larger perspective, I think, though, the band had been on an upward trajectory for 15 straight years, which is something probably very few bands get to experience,” says Puget. “And so, you can’t expect to do that for your entire career.”

Now signed to the Concord Music Group, AFI are on a new career upswing and still making music very much on their own terms, with Puget officially taking over production duties for the first time on the emotive and atmospheric AFI (The Blood Album). “On our last record, Burials, I had started doing a lot of the production ideas before we even hit the studio or hired a producer,” explains Puget. “And so after Burials, it’s kind of like, let’s just cut out the middleman … rather than paying someone 30 grand to come in and do it. I think at this point we’re all capable enough at what we do to go in there and make a record.”

Check out AFI’s full Backspin interview here. For more details and behind-the-scenes anecdotes about the making of each of their 10 albums, from 1995’s Answer That and Stay Fashionable through the just-released AFI (The Blood Album).

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This article originally ran on Yahoo Music.