Stephan Jenkins is lying on a bed in Brooklyn. It’s a documentary screening night—Third Eye Blind’s Our Band Apart has been filmed, finished, and finally released into the wild. But Jenkins looks like he just wandered in from a nap, which feels appropriate considering the album it documents is one of the loosest, most natural-sounding things he’s ever made.
“There’s no click track,” he says, like a guy who knows most modern pop is birthed on a grid. “We played that song twenty-three times. No punching in. No fixing. Just... playing it until it felt right.”
He’s talking about “Funeral Singers,” a rocked-up, electrified take on the Sylvan Esso cover of the Califone original. Jenkins delivers it with more grit than grace, and that’s the point. “All my friends are funeral singers,” he says, quoting the chorus with the reverence of someone still processing a pandemic's worth of isolation and despair. “We’re lighthouse keepers. We're all just beaming something out, hoping it lands.”
If Third Eye Blind were once known for the polished radio punch of “Semi-Charmed Life” and “Jumper,” Our Band Apart is something else entirely. It’s not a reinvention. It’s a release.
Jenkins originally had a different album ready to go pre-pandemic. “We were going to workshop it on tour, record it after,” he says. But once the world stopped, so did that version of the record. “It didn’t feel authentic anymore. It felt like something I wasn’t part of.”
So he started again. Wrote an entirely new album during lockdown. And instead of trying to chase a hit—or even sound like Third Eye Blind™—he just let the songs be what they wanted.
“I don’t give a shit what radio format it goes to,” he says. “I don’t care if it fits in a movie. I just want it to have integrity. I want it to be whole in itself.”
This ethos carries through the record. Songs like “To the Sea” feel like ambient diary entries—murmured vocals, Bon Iver textures, literal ocean noise from the mic Jenkins held on the shore while singing lyrics he'd only written minutes earlier. “I said to Ryan Olson, our co-producer, ‘This is just a scratch vocal.’ He goes, ‘No, it’s not. That’s the take.’”
Jenkins sounds almost delighted by how little effort it took—by how much he trusted the imperfection. “First time I ever opened my mouth on that song—that’s what you hear on the record. Ocean and all.”
Of course, he knows this kind of looseness isn’t what every fan signs up for. “We released 'To the Sea,' and some people were furious,” he says. “They want the old Third Eye Blind. They want the rocking guitars. They want the mosquito in amber—frozen in time.”
But Jenkins isn’t interested in preservation. He’s interested in permeability. “I want to stay open to the times I’m in. This record is me emotionally wrangling with the world around me. Not the one from 1997.”
Sometimes that wrangling gets meta. “Silverlake Neophyte” sounds like a folk song having an existential breakdown. Is it sincere? Is it satire? Jenkins grins. “It’s both. I’m falling in love with L.A., with the neo-folk scene, but also wondering—am I just posing? Am I intimidated by how honest these new artists are?”
He name-drops Adrianne Lenker (“She’s probably my favorite artist right now”) and Phoebe Bridgers (“Her honesty in every note—it’s just impressive”). But Jenkins isn’t just cosplaying Gen Z. “I’m not trying to be them. I’m just inspired. It made me look at myself and ask—what am I willing to say? What am I willing to risk?”
The album plays with that duality. There’s a beautiful nervousness under songs like “Goodbye to the Days of Ladies and Gentlemen,” a grasping for something that may not be tangible. And then there’s “Dust Storm,” a track that opens with such an unmistakable Cure bassline you’d think Robert Smith had wandered into the session.
“Absolutely intentional,” Jenkins says. “We just let it be influenced. My guitar tech said it’s the best Cure song ever written. And we were like, yeah—let’s roll with that.”
That mix of reverence and irreverence—of grasping and goofing—is exactly what makes Our Band Apart such a weirdly satisfying listen. There are no declarations of reinvention. No grandstanding. Just a band—loose, live, human—sounding like themselves by not trying so hard to be themselves.
Even the recording process felt like a hang. “Jeff Schroeder from Smashing Pumpkins showed up one day just to say hi,” Jenkins recalls. “I was like, cool—you’re in the band now. Grab a guitar.”
That casual spontaneity may be the record’s greatest asset. It’s not a concept album. It’s not trying to be definitive. It’s just trying to be honest.
“I think because of the pandemic,” Jenkins says, “we all dropped some of the performance. We became more real. Less razzle-dazzle.”
There’s still razzle, though. Watch the documentary and you’ll find Jenkins turning a found five-dollar bill into a band-wide competition. “This is going to the most exemplary musician,” he declares on day one. And who took it home?
“Our bass player, Cav,” Jenkins says proudly. “He earned it.”
That might be the best metaphor for Our Band Apart—a record that doesn’t offer flash but does offer feeling. A record where effortlessness comes not from ease, but from trust.
Sometimes the first take is the take. Sometimes the rough vocal is the real one. And sometimes the most meaningful moment is just a five-dollar bill, passed hand to hand, in a studio full of friends trying to feel something again.
Watch the interview above and then check out the video below.
