‘This is the record that properly represents us’: Inside AFI’s journey to its definitive album

“What if I died right here in front of you?” Davey Havok says, his eyes beaming with childlike joy. “Wouldn’t that be good? That would make for a better piece. Let me see what I can do. I’ll try.”

At a small table in the middle of Hollywood’s Sightglass Coffee, the conversation about the AFI vocalist’s possible sudden death has drawn the eyes of coffee drinkers in the surrounding area. And despite the 49-year-old songwriter’s insistence that his demise would improve the quality of this article, the catalyst for the discussion was something he very much wants to be alive for: the release of AFI’s 12th full-length album, “Silver Bleeds the Black Sun,” out Friday from Run for Cover Records.

A whopping 35 years into AFI’s career (along with side projects like the electronic Blaqk Audio and poppy Dreamcar), Havok has finally put together a record that he would be happy to leave behind as the final piece of his legacy — hence the mortality discussion. But his love for “Silver Bleeds the Black Sun” also gives Havok (born David Passaro) a slight cause for concern. The last time he remembers feeling this strongly about an album was 2009’s “Crash Love,” which was released fresh off of the success of two now-platinum albums (2003’s mainstream breakthrough “Sing the Sorrow” and 2006’s chart-topping “Decemberunderground”).

“With every record we’ve put out since [1997’s] ‘Shut Your Mouth and Open Your Eyes,’ we lose some fans and gain some more — except ‘Crash Love,’ then we lost 900,000 fans,” Havok says, wearing a sleeveless black shirt over his primarily blacked-out arms. “It was clear that the 900,000 fans that were there for those couple of years of MTV and magazine covers were there for different reasons, but it was still really brutal. ‘Crash Love’ was such a fun record to make, whereas ‘Decemberunderground’ wasn’t. I felt so good about ‘Crash Love,’ in a similar way that I do about ‘Silver Bleeds the Black Sun.’ I thought ‘This is f— it. This is the record that properly represents us.’ We knew that with the way music was being consumed, we weren’t going to sell a million records, but I was thinking, ‘You’ve got to be emotionally prepared, because it’s probably only going to go gold.’ The record went entirely unnoticed. Nobody knew it came out. We’re on tour and people in fan club T-shirts are asking us why we’re on tour. It was a bummer because I love that record so much, but it did prepare me for today. I love this record more than any other record we’ve made, and I know there’s a good chance that no one’s going to hear it — just like no one heard ‘Crash Love.’”

“When you’re a band that’s been around for such a long time, people have already decided how they feel about you — and sometimes those decisions were made in 2003 with ‘Sing the Sorrow,’ and sometimes it was made in ’97 when someone went to a hardcore show,” drummer Adam Carson adds via Zoom. “But I’m finding that there’s a lot of people who weren’t too engaged in what we were doing that are hearing new songs and going, ‘I didn’t know it was like that.’ I’m hoping that people hear [‘Silver Bleeds the Black Sun’] and we elevate people’s perceptions of what we’ve been up to for the last couple of presidential administrations.”

Dating back even to AFI’s 1995 debut as a teenage hardcore band (“Answer That and Stay Fashionable”), no two of the rock band’s albums have ever sounded similar. In fact, every couple of releases the group takes a drastic shift into unexpected territory. With “Silver Bleeds the Black Sun,” that shift comes in the form of a collection of songs so heavily influenced by their favorite post-punk bands that Bauhaus’ “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” would fit perfectly among them.

While the band knows the latest sound might not be a favorite among every AFI fan, it’s already reaching some new listeners. Going in an unexpected direction that the four bandmates all love is an easy and somewhat calculated risk the band has earned at this point in its career — and one necessary in order to breathe new inspiration into its music while staying authentic to themselves.

Of course, no matter what genres AFI dives into, the iconic group still maintains an identifiable sound and feel that’s all its own. Havok, Carson, guitarist Jade Puget and bassist Hunter Burgan (both of whom joined the band in the late ’90s) have explored different sounds and themes for nearly three decades, with each album carrying a distinct sound and aesthetic that still fits within their larger discography. Diving headfirst into post-punk after dipping their toes into the genre on previous albums is no greater of a change than when Havok and Puget decided to try a slower tempo on “God Called in Sick Today” as the closer for 1999’s “Black Sails in the Sunset,” and it’s been made easier by the fact that they’ve all been doing it together for so long.

“You look at bands that have been around for this long, and it’s these angry, bitter grandpas who are always feuding and can’t get along,” Puget says via Zoom. “They’re all in separate dressing rooms and buses, and they hate each other, and they’re just doing it for the check. We’ve been extremely lucky to just get along with each other and be friends. Davey and I, as the songwriting duo, we’ve never fought. In almost 30 years, we’ve never had an argument because we get along so well. A lot of times, bands start out with everyone on the same page, and then everyone starts growing in different directions and fighting. We just don’t have that, so we’re incredibly lucky in that respect.”

“We all know each other so well that we know exactly where each other will be onstage without looking,” Havok says. “Even in the moments where something is a little off, we can all sense that something isn’t right or that we might be in danger. That type of understanding plays into the creation of the music as well, where Jade and I will just flow. With ‘Silver Bleeds the Black Sun,’ there were times where I would just show up and Jade would already have these complete, beautiful bodies of music written.”

As the conversation with Havok moves to a bench across the street after his favorite coffee shop closed for the evening, the talkative vocalist’s interests range from his love of Lana Del Rey, the Ramones (so much so that he sings in a local cover band, Ramones X), Coachella fashion, maintaining his voice on tour and his issues with technology — like new fans being introduced to artists on by their most popular streaming songs, which isn’t an accurate representation for a band like AFI.

To be fair, it’s nearly impossible to find a single song (or album, for that matter) that is the definitive “sound” of AFI. With a discography ranging from growling hardcore to radio-friendly pop-rock to their current foray into post-punk, the band has gone through more musical eras than Taylor Swift while staying remarkably consistent in other ways. As the sound of each record has changed in one way or another, the quartet largely attributes their sobriety, mix of personalities and unquenchable thirst to keep making music as the throughlines keeping the ship steady all these years later. And in some ways, that stability within the band — along with a supportive and open-minded fan base — is what allows the artists to explore new musical pathways with each release.

“What’s made AFI unique is that we have so many different influences, and they always find a way into our music,” Carson says. “With past records, it’s this amalgamation of all our influences affecting the songwriting and coming up with a disparate group of songs that — filtered through us — has a cohesion to sound like an AFI record. This is the first time we were narrowing the influences we were drawing from. Instead of just dumping everything in, we were very focused on making a group of songs that really live with each other and stay within these narrow parameters of our influences.”

“Having done so many records with different situations and motivations, we decided we wanted to do something for ourselves,” Burgan adds via Zoom from the patio of a coffee shop. “The sound we’ve created over the years has always been what happens when four people with totally different influences come together, so there’s always been a push and pull. Even back in our earliest punk days, I was always trying to put more jazz into stuff. [‘Silver Bleeds the Black Sun’] is definitely more in alignment with the music that I enjoy, so it’s less of me trying to fight against what’s happening and more of an alignment.”

AFI band members, left to right, Jade Puget, Davey Havok, Hunter Burgen and Adam Carson.

(Matt Seidel / For The Times)

But with all of the usual attention on the band as it prepared to release “Silver Bleeds the Black Sun,” there was still one moment that caught everyone off guard. After Havok’s lengthy video interview with “Alternative Press” in August, his new look — a thick mustache with a combination of mid-length curls and long braids — swept across the internet in a manner that most middle-aged men’s appearances don’t garner. With a career that includes modeling, magazine covers and being named “World’s Sexiest Vegetarian” in 2007, the not-particularly-online singer isn’t new to his various hairstyles and fashion choices making headlines, but even he wasn’t expecting the barrage of memes his friends started sending him.

“I don’t really get involved [with social media], but friends would text me some of the memes,” Havok says with a laugh. “One friend texted me something where some metal band was using the images of me being overly expressive — because I look like an insane person — to sell a T-shirt. A couple of days later, a friend showed me that I was on a flier for some show that AFI has nothing to do with. I was genuinely amazed and shocked at how far it was all going. It’s very curious.”

“Not only have we been around for so long, but [Havok’s] had a lot of pretty drastically different looks over the years, so I think it’s very interesting that people still care enough to talk about the singer of our band’s facial hair — whether they hate it or they love it,” Puget says with a smirk beneath his own beard. “I guess it’s a good thing, because if people didn’t care about us at all, it wouldn’t matter. The fact that something like that can be so polarizing, I can only imagine what the new record’s going to do to people.”