Nevertel: “You appreciate the view a lot more when you’ve had to claw your way to the top”

Reminiscing about how they came together back in high school, Nevertel don’t begin with the bands they were listening to at the time, or any shared dreams of superstardom, but rather the shoot ’em up video games through which they first bonded as friends: Call Of Duty, Halo and Gears Of War. It’s telling. Legions of new fans may have just discovered the Floridian trio through the cutting edge alt.rock of aptly-titled third album Start Again, but rather than the work of crack players embracing hit trends, it’s just the latest step in a relationship about far more than music.

“At the start, it wasn’t like, ‘We’re going to be in a band and we’re going to be huge,’” smiles lead vocalist Jeremy Michael. “It was more, ‘Dude, have you heard that song? Should we try to play it tonight?!’ Everything flowed organically. We were writing music, then playing it, so we started a band. We were recording songs, so we started posting them online. Then, ‘Maybe we should start making videos?’ The more we performed together, the more we started thinking things like, ‘Man, wouldn’t it be cool if we kept doing this and got to share a stage with Linkin Park some day?!’”

Guitarist/rapper Raul Lopez and fellow six-stringer Alec Davis smile widely. Although early influences ranged from mainstream rockers Three Days Grace and Breaking Benjamin to metalcore heavyweights August Burns Red and The Devil Wears Prada, few other musicians have had quite the impact of Mike Shinoda and company. It’s obvious in the gleaming high production and earworm vocal interplay of songs like Losing Faith and Miles Apart. More than simply their sound, though, Linkin Park’s spirit is directly responsible for steering the trio. When Raul had moved away to Boston to “get a job and try to be a normal human being” there was a danger that their friendship would fade and old musical chemistry would fizzle out. Ironically, finding work and having disposable income meant that the guitarist could afford to go see LP live for the first time on 2014’s Carnivores tour, which in turn renewed a desire to gather his friends and go for it.

“I was done with music,” Raul remembers. “I’d even sold all of my studio gear. But that show reignited a fire that I thought was buried. I was getting goosebumps and tearing up. It was really incredible. Coming out of the venue I realised that this was my life: I was built to make music!”

Overnight success would not be on the cards, however. Instead it was the beginning of a long, hard journey to where we sit today. Rap-rock wasn’t initially on the agenda, either: Raul’s talent only stumbled upon in a moment of bored experimentation. The five years between lively 2016 debut Living Fiction and 2021’s far more accomplished Everything In My Mind were full of learning, with the accumulated expertise in everything from self-production to album rollouts and Spotify playlist placement giving them invaluable understanding and appreciation of the record deal that only recently materialised. Even embarrassments were embraced for the lessons contained within, like the night – ill-advised and under practised – they agreed to a four-hour set at Tampa’s Hard Rock Cafe and found themselves having to pack up and bail out after the first 45 minutes…

“You learn a lot from your failures,” shrugs Alec. “That one was monumental. But I remember going to Denny’s afterwards and discussing how that would never happen again. Being humbled allowed us to say ‘What are we capable of?’ ‘Where are we now?’ and ‘Where do we want to go?’”

Heading towards album three, a perfect storm of personal upheaval drove Nevertel to step things up again. The experience of actually going out on tour was testing, forcing them to find a balance between being old friends and becoming businessmen: sleep-deprived and stressed out. Raul went through a divorce. Similarly, Jeremy experienced the end of a long-term relationship and ended up living with Alec for the best part of a year. Alec found himself grappling with personal loss.

“Everything that I thought I was gonna have out of life changed and I had to find a new way forward, a new normal,” Jeremy explains. “It became about writing yourself a new story because the one you were working on for so long just got ripped right out of your hands. We needed a second chance in our personal lives. We were starting off with a new life in a new place, with new goals. We needed to hit the reset button on a lot of things and find the fun again rather than letting band life get to us. We had to find the balance between [friendship and professionalism].”

The last few years have been a chaotic blur. Getting serious about work, the trio began to field offers from record labels, but unsatisfied with what was on the table and confident in their own abilities they made an active decision to back themselves and go it alone. Barely a month after that moment, they saw single Everything On My Mind go viral on TikTok and a new wave of attention.

“We got that song on on the radio – on hard rotation on Sirius XM Octane – as an independent act,” Raul marvels. “Then we were approached by [iconic alternative label] Epitaph. The first thing [label founder and Bad Religion guitarist] Brett [Gurewitz] asked was, ‘Why do you need us?’ That felt like the partnership that we were looking for. We found our team. We found our home. We hound a place where we could build Nevertel to be bigger than any of us!”

Start Again does exactly what it says on the tin. Harnessing the emotion and unease of its authors’ personal upheaval to slingshot them to previously unthinkable heights, it crackles less like a next chapter than a fresh beginning. Working with new friends like Bring Me The Horizon collaborators Gianni Taylor and Dan Lancaster as well as Sleep Theory’s David Cowell (and the rest of his band on standout single Break The Silence) they wrote and recorded across America. The last completed song Good Intentions was even finished across continents while Jeremy was in Australia.

“We’d written ourselves for so long that we’d gotten stuck in the same patterns, trying the same things and getting the same results,” the singer expands. “We didn’t have that spark of inspiration we needed. Going to all these different places didn’t just prove how far we could come from writing in our bedrooms a year ago – writing with people we would’ve freaked out over as kids – but it showed that we were really moving the needle and getting to where we wanted to be. We were learning the whole time about different ways to start a song – sometimes just as conversations – or what to do when you were stuck. But when it came to actually recording with me, Raul and Alec, the setting might have changed but it felt the same as it always has.”

With a sound already fit for arenas, money-can’t-buy experience in their back pockets and a rush of new people looking to get involved, the world is opening up for Nevertel. Still, it’s important that they hold true to the old values and camaraderie that set them on this path in the first place.

“We’ve always wanted to get to a point where it could [make a difference],” stresses Raul with real conviction. “You always hear those stories about music changing people’s lives. One of my big goals is to inspire the kid who’d just heard one of our songs to pick up a guitar, learn drums or try to sing. Because I remember that feeling when I got it and how it changed my life. For a long time I could have found myself out on the streets being an idiot. Music saved me from that.”

Jeremy signs off by tying back to the band’s very beginnings – and the school days before.

“A lot of times on the road, you meet bands made up of players whose other bands broke up and the best from those other bands got together to make a ‘super-band’,” he says. “Or they met through some Facebook group or on Craigslist. We started out looking for friends and we found bandmates. The 10 years in Nevertel we’ve spent learning how to do it has gotten us to the position where we’ve already gone through the highs and low, ego death and everything else even before a record label even became involved. Whether we were going to win together or fail, it was always going to be together. I’m very thankful that we had to spend those years climbing to this point. You appreciate the view a lot more when you’ve had to claw your way to the top rather than just jumping in an elevator and hitting a button. I’m glad that’s the Nevertel story!”

Start Again is out now via Epitaph. Nevertel are on tour in the UK with Bury Tomorrow in October

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