Brandon Boyd Reflects on Incubus’ Past and Its ‘New Era’ (Exclusive)

To Brandon Boyd, Incubus is deep in the throes of what can only be described as a “new era.”

The frontman of the award-winning, chart-topping alternative rock troop, 49, tells PEOPLE that he is particularly energized by both revisiting his band’s classics, as they’ve been doing specifically via their ongoing Morning View tour, as well as cherishing all of the positive change that has befallen the group as of late.

In 2001, Incubus released Morning View, a nostalgic project for many listeners that has since become a cornerstone of their discography. Boasting fan favorites such as “Are You In?” and “Wish You Were Here,” their work on that project, as well as its predecessor, 1999’s Make Yourself, established the group as one of the preeminent voices in the genre at the time.

Now, since forming the group in 1991, Boyd and his high school friends-turned bandmates are looking to carry a new iteration of that energy into 2025 and beyond.

“I definitely feel like it is a new era for us,” Boyd shares. “For a number of reasons. Revisiting Morning View at the Hollywood Bowl initially was a terrifying challenge. We had never done it before. We played the bowl a handful of times, and it’s always an amazing experience. It’s kind of like our home game, so to speak.”

“But then we did the show… and it was like, ‘Oh, we did it.’ That was going to be really hard. And it ended up being really fun, and it went by really fast,” he adds of the 2023 performance.

On top of that seminal show, which has since culminated into a full-fledged touring effort with the band popping up for a special guest appearance during Zedd’s set during Coachella 2025’s second weekend, as well as headlining the Viña del Mar International Song Festival in Chile and London’s famed O2 arena, Boyd says he and the band were also energized by a new face in their ranks: Nicole Row.

“We had Nicole Row join our band, who had played with Panic! at the Disco for a number of years before they kind of closed up shop, and I think she was on her way home from their last show when we reached out to her. The timing was very serendipitous,” the singer explains.

Row first worked with Incubus as a temporary replacement for bass player Ben Kenney, who was recovering from brain surgery, before being brought on full-time with the group in February 2024.

Boyd reflects on coming together with Row, “We hung out with her a little bit, and we immediately vibed with her and started playing with her and started writing music with her. And she started learning a bunch of music from our catalog, which I think she’s still doing because there’s quite a lot of music at this point.”

With such an extensive discography for Row to dive into, Boyd relishes in the specific sustaining success of Morning View, sharing that the goal of touring the album again was to “find a way to honor something that is 20 plus years old and remind people that had that experience when they were 20 plus years younger, bring that to them again, but also hopefully find new ears as well.”

“Every once in a while, it’s a rare opportunity, you can make something that kind of cuts through a little bit and lasts a little bit longer,” he adds. “So it’s amazing to tell you the truth. It’s amazing to have the opportunity to, number one, make something with your close friends in a really special environment and a really unique time in your life, and then have the opportunity to revisit it and share it again and again and again and again.”

Ultimately, Boyd surmises that the culminating factors of being catalyzed to tour Morning View and re-release the album in its entirety in 2024 were the deciding factors in sparking the band’s new era.

“Between the Morning View experience and Nicole, that was sort of the kickstart. It was sort of the end of the pandemic era, into now, it feels like our windshield got polished, and all of a sudden, it was like, oh, we have so much here,” he notes. “There’s so much kind of in our history and our sort of burgeoning legacy, if you will. But there’s also so much music in us that still has yet to see the light of day, and this is still so much fun.”

The “Drive” singer adds, “It’s mostly fun still, even despite the scarier, darker parts of life that come creeping in no matter who you are, this thing that we do together is still a blast.”

As a group of musicians who are still having a “blast” together, Boyd proudly shares that the new era of Incubus also includes a new album, their first since 2017’s 8.

“This new record, Something in the Water, we’re going to call it. I don’t know when it’s going to come out, but we were thinking about putting out the whole record in October,” he shares.

“I felt proud of what we have made,” he adds. “And I still feel proud of it. So other than that, I can’t really tell you. It sounds like us. “It’s like heavy and weird, but it’s also kind of classic sounding. And the ideas that we’re playing with are, to me, they’re interesting. The musicianship is beautiful. It’s simple and clever.”

For Boyd, “Making music is the way that I make sense of the world and my experience.” As a result, he’s hoping “this new body of work will be not only a window into that, but can hopefully connect once again with people around the world and maybe, God forbid, even help them make sense of their experience.”