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Six years ago, The Band CAMINO was supposed to spend the summer of their breakout year opening up for 5 Seconds of Summer. Like so many plans in 2020, the tour disappeared before it ever began, leaving behind one of those lingering what-ifs that every band collects along the way. Now, after years of touring and an ambitious discography, they’re finally stepping onto those stages — only this time, as a band with a far clearer sense of who they are.

“We’ve lost band members, we’ve changed teams, our music has shifted… It feels like we’re in a place to truly appreciate this opportunity more than we would have then,” Jeffery Jordan says from their dressing room. They are two dates into what will be a 43-show run, one of the longest tours they’ve ever done. Much has changed in the six years since they were originally booked for a support slot: lineup shifts, evolving creative ambitions, and a double album have transformed what was once a rising alternative trio into a band entering an entirely new chapter. 

With growth and a newfound perspective that can only be gained with time, those six years didn’t just reshape The Band CAMINO — the themes became the foundation of ‘NeverAlways’, their latest album. Released across two volumes over the course of a year, the project reflects on identity, change, and the push-and-pull between who you are and who you’re still becoming. Every detail serves that larger idea: hidden callbacks, mirrored visuals, and a tracklist that loops seamlessly back to its opening moments transform the record into a continuous cycle rather than a collection of songs. 

Fresh off the release of ‘NeverAlways Vol. 2’ and in the middle of finally joining 5SOS on the road, Jeffery Jordan, Spencer Stewart, and Garrison Burgess of the Band CAMINO sat down with Editor Kelsey Barnes to reflect on the long road back to this moment, the evolution behind the album, and more.

You were originally meant to open for 5SOS in 2020, so this feels like we are righting some wrongs. I want you to think back to The Band CAMINO in 2020 and reflect on your growth as a unit since then. I think it’s cool that you’re able to come to this tour with a new perspective and experience.

Jeffery Jordan: A lot has changed. Honestly, it does feel like we’ve been bummed about losing that tour for the last six years, but now that it’s come full circle, it starts to make sense. It feels like we’re in a place to capitalize on it and truly appreciate it more, and make the most of the opportunity at this point in our lives more than we would have at that time. We’ve lost band members, we’ve changed teams, our music has shifted, our taste has shifted. I’m 31 now, so I would’ve been 25 then, and you’re just in a lot different place from 25 or 26 to 31 or 32. It feels much different.

At that point, you only had a handful of EPs out, too, so now you have a lot more to pick through. Ten songs, is that the setlist?

Jordan: Ten, and we’ve actually only played nine the other night because we have 40 minutes. 

Garrison Burgess: It rolls by really fast.

Jordan: Yeah. I guess we had three EPs out at that point. We’d just signed with Elektra in 2019, we’d gone on our first two headline tours, and then coming into 2020, we had the Dan + Shay arena tour. Then we had the 5SOS tour later that year.

Spencer Stweart: We were on the way to Philadelphia for the Dan + Shay tour, and halfway there, they were like, “Yeah, turn around For the foreseeable future, we’re not doing any shows.” Crazy.

You’ve been touring ‘NeverAlways’ over the last year. How has the experience of people singing those songs back to you changed your relationship with them? Building an album and songwriting is such an intimate process, but when you actually hear other people singing those songs back to you, it’s a completely different experience.

Jordan: Yeah, you see the songs in a whole new light. You almost see them the way you saw them at the beginning again. When you first write a song, it’s new to you, and you’re excited. Not that you don’t stay excited, but there’s a freshness to it.

Stewart: It breathes a little more energy into them. I think they all mean something different to everyone, so it’s nice to see different perspectives and also remember your own perspective when you were writing them. I think that’s pretty cool.

Jordan: Yeah, it takes them back to the beginning a little bit. It’s like a new beginning for the songs. Especially with ‘Volume 2’, we wrote a lot of those songs in 2024, and they’re coming out in 2026. We’ve been so close to them for so long that finally getting to put them out into the world and hear them for the first time is like, “Oh, this is what they actually sound like again.” I couldn’t even tell anymore. Maybe that’s just because we sat on them for so long.

Was it important for you guys to release this as a double album instead of having it exist as its own entity?

Jordan: Yeah, the thought was, with so many of our last few projects, we’d put out a body of work and then go dark for a few months while we made the next album. We’d taken some time to find ourselves on this album, and we’d written all these songs. We didn’t want to just put them all out and have that be it. We wanted to spread them out over the course of 18 months – almost two years – as one cycle instead. I think we’re in such a singles-driven world.

When I interviewed you guys right before ‘NeverAlways Vol. 1’, you were teasing songs like “Afterthought,” and you were like, “Maybe it’ll be a deluxe, we don’t know.” It’s nice to see it come full circle.

Jordan: We could put all 22 of these songs out at once, and then they’d only be new for a little while. Or we could spread those 22 songs out over a longer period of time and keep giving fans new things to chew on and new songs to discover. It’s hard enough to get people to listen to an 11-song album, let alone a 22-song album. It just felt like a fun pivot to doing a double album.

A headline show is very different from opening for 5 Seconds of Summer. There are songs like “Daphne Blue” that obviously have to stay in the set, but with such a vast discography with a lot of bangers and fan faves, how are you structuring the setlist for this compared to other tours?

Burgess: It’s interesting because the setlist conversation could be three or four sit-downs before we even start building one. We have a list of songs we know people want to hear, but when you’re putting out a new body of work, you’re taking a guess and hoping people connect with certain songs. It’s kind of like picking your favourite children, and that’s difficult. We always have a lot of alternates available at the end of a set that we can throw in. For example, on the last tour, we only played “Afterthought” every once in a while because we’d just decide, “We’re feeling it tonight. Let’s do it.” Having those options is nice, but it’s definitely a process. I think we do a pretty good job of keeping those peaks and valleys throughout a set.

For this 5 Seconds of Summer tour, it’s basically 10 bangers back to back. For a headline tour, we’re trying to take you on more of a journey – high-intensity moments, then putting us in our feels for a second, then building the energy back up again and just having a good time.

Jordan: For this set, we’re really trying to keep the energy high because we’re the opener. We’re trying to give people a snapshot of our whole sonic palette – a brief introduction to who we are as a band – without having too many slower or more intimate moments. Those songs can be hard to pull off as an opening band. So it’s a mixture of high-energy songs while also giving the most accurate representation of who we are to someone who’s never heard us before, and hopefully winning them over as a fan while keeping their attention for the whole set.

“Do What You Gotta Do”, that pre-chorus scratches something in my brain. I don’t know what it is. I wanted to ask a little bit about writing and recording that song specifically.

Stewart: Yeah. I wrote that song with a guy named Andrew Goldstein, who’s a frequent collaborator of ours. We’ve written a few with him and a guy named Jack LaFrantz. It was completely different at the time. The only thing we actually kept from the original version was the pre-chorus, so it’s funny that you mentioned that.

At the time, we were just kind of throwing paint at the wall, and I think it was a little more left of center than what we would typically do. It’s definitely a little poppier, and I don’t want to say it had a Taylor Swift sort of thing, but that’s kind of what we were going for at the time. Then we brought it to the guys. We didn’t end up using it for the first half because we were still workshopping a couple of things, and I think it came out a hundred times better once we all got involved.

Jordan: Have you listened to the original recently? I listened to it the other day after it came out, and I was like…

Stewart: Yeah, it’s extremely different. I think we definitely landed on the right version. For the same reason as you – there’s definitely something about it. I think it’s the phonetics with the melody. There’s something there, so I’m glad we kept it.

Jordan: We did write a new pre-chorus for it.

Stewart: It just didn’t feel… It wasn’t better.

Jordan: We had to go back to the original.

Then, with “Holly,” I saw people commenting on Instagram that it was like a Taylor Swift moment with the key change. What was the decision behind that? Was it just something that felt right at the time?

Stewart: We’ve been wanting to do it for years. We’d just never done a key change. We could never figure out a non-corny way to execute it.

Burgess: It genuinely happened in the room because it’s such a freeing track. Somebody — I don’t remember who, it could’ve been any one of the three of us — very vividly just said, “What if we just did it, guys?” We were like, “We may as well try stuff now.” We do it every night now, and it’s great. It feels good.

Volume 2, to me, feels a lot more outward-looking, whereas Volume 1 seems a bit more introspective. Is that something you guys would agree with? And was that intentional when you were separating the two volumes?

Stewart: I think, in a way. I do feel like a lot of the songs we put on Volume 2 just needed a little more time, and some we intentionally put on the back end, but I don’t know.

Jordan: Yeah, we definitely tried to tell a story with each one. I don’t know if we actually knew what that story was, but we had a feeling about which songs we wanted on the back half. I do think maybe, subconsciously, there is less of that introspective stuff on the back half and more relationship-retrospective, where you sit in the world, getting older… Those kinds of songs. It was definitely a puzzle trying to figure out what belonged where, because there were some songs where we thought, “Let’s just wait on this. We should keep tweaking it.” We also didn’t want there to be a clear favourite where people would say, “Oh, Volume 1 is way better.”

Like, “it has all the singles.”

Jordan: Yeah, exactly. That’s how a lot of deluxe albums feel. It’s like, “Here’s all the singles, and now here are the leftover songs that didn’t actually make the album.” We didn’t want that. We wanted to spread everything out. “Holly” was definitely the song that everyone – from the team to the label – felt was the most commercial, the most radio-friendly single. We thought, “Let’s sit on it.” That was tough because part of me thought, “What if we just put it out now?” But instead, we decided to build momentum with Volume 1. If we really believed “Holly” was that song, then let’s save it for the right moment. Now “Do What You Gotta Do” is doing really well, and it feels like we did save certain songs for the right moment.

I love “Mirror Mirror.” That was an instant favourite. The line, “stuck somewhere between who I am and who I want to be,” I really, really love.

Jordan: Thank you so much. People ask what’s the hardest song to finish – that song! [Laughs]

Stewart: It took us forever. We had the whole song, but we could not figure out that tag.

Jordan: We changed that line so many times. The original line was something like, “My montage of mistakes goes on for miles. I’ll lay them out for you to see – all of me.” We just felt like there was something better we could put there, so we kept changing it.

Stewart: We auditioned so many different ideas.

Jordan: We’d leave the studio thinking, “Okay, I think that’s it,” and then we’d listen back the next day and think, “That’s not it.” We’d go back into the studio and try something else.

Burgess: I’m pretty positive it was the final piece of the record. Other than mixing, I think the last vocal punch on the entire record was that line. I can’t think of anything we worked on after that.

Jordan: Even now, when I listen to the song, I still haven’t heard it enough times for it to feel completely settled. I still catch myself thinking, “Wait… which ending did we go with again?” Then I hear it and go, “Oh yeah… who I am and who I want to be.”

There’s a fade from Volume 2 on “What’s Always Been” into Volume 1’s “Has Just Begun” that I really love. Can you talk a little bit about the decision to loop Volume 2 back into Volume 1?

Burgess: Yeah. I remember when we did it. I actually still have the file. I don’t know if we’d planned it before… I think we did.

Stewart: That was one of the first things we did, even before we had finished all the songs.

Burgess: Yeah, because we already had “What’s Always Been” and “Has Just Begun,” and that originally was the outro of “What’s Always Been.” I don’t remember who suggested it, but I have the file where we tied them together. I was like, “Guys, I think this is going to work.” We just took a couple of pieces from the end of one song and moved them to the beginning of the other, and it tied together really well.

Jordan: They were both in the same key, and we knew we wanted to use “Has Just Begun” as the intro. We also knew they were in the same key, so we thought, “How can we connect these?” It didn’t make sense to have them both at the top of a record.

Then, you know, the titles come from the lyric in the last song: “What’s always been has just begun.” So now it completes the phrase, and it completes the loop. The first single was called “Infinity.” We have all these…

Stewart: Circular moments.

Jordan: Yeah, all these loops and circular patterns – patterns of life cycles. That was the theme of the whole album, and it felt cool to represent that by completing the loop.

I usually ask artists or bands, when they release an album, whether it feels like a chapter closing or a chapter beginning. But with this one, it feels very much like a closing chapter because it is so circular.

Stewart: Yeah, definitely. It was a full thought that we’d been working on for, what, two years? It is a little bittersweet to say goodbye to it. I mean, we’re starting to say goodbye to it because everybody else is just saying hello to it.

Jordan: Right. For us, it definitely feels like the creative chapter is over. We saw the vision through, and now the songs get to go do what they do.

Garrison, you took on a much larger role with the production during this era. I wanted to ask a little bit about that experience and whether there was anything on the two Volumes that was a production decision you made that might surprise listeners or that they maybe haven’t picked up on yet.

Burgess: I don’t know if there was a specific decision that would surprise anybody. I think we just really wanted to work on this record ourselves. Between Volumes 1 and 2 — because, as we said, some of the songs on Volume 2 were written at the same time as songs on Volume 1 — a lot of it was just the three of us wanting to take stabs at something that felt new and fresh to us, based on what we’d been inspired by. Anything we either produced ourselves, co-produced, or worked on with somebody else, the idea was always to start with the three of us, our brains, and what we were trying to say and get across. Between producing some of it ourselves and then taking ideas to other people, that’s really how we came up with the record.

I believe ‘NeverAlways’ came from a misheard quote, right?

Jordan: Yeah. I was reading something, and I thought it said one thing. When I went back to find it, it wasn’t there. For some reason, I thought the quote was saying that the way this person chose to live their life was, “I either want something in my life never or always.” It’s an extreme way to live, and it obviously doesn’t apply to everything, but when it comes to relationships or the things you really want to commit to, it’s about being fully in or fully out — not living in that gray area. That was the idea.

I don’t know where I got it from because that’s not what the quote said at all. But then we wrote the song based on that idea — the song on Volume 2 that’s called “Never and Always.” We didn’t have the album title yet, but we had these themes, and we had that song. We wrote it with the band Hovvdy, if you know them — they’re super sick. Then we thought, “Well, we could call the album Never and Always,” and eventually we just landed on ‘NeverAlways’, based on the song and the overall theme because we already knew we wanted “Infinity” to be the first single, everything just kind of fit together.

Has the title or its meaning changed for you guys after this past year?

Jordan: I don’t know if it’s changed. It just feels like it fits more and more as time goes on. It just feels like the right title. It’s like anything — maybe when you say it enough times, it just starts to feel like the right name.

Stewart: Yeah, I think once we had all the context of both parts of the record, especially with what you were referring to earlier — the more introspective side versus the more outward-looking side — it all started to make a lot more sense. We also inverted the words on the records, so it all fits. It all feels like it exists in the same world. It makes more sense the more time goes on, just living with it. Especially with the continuation between the records, all the pieces started to come together. You make all the pieces, but you don’t always have the opportunity to put them together until the very end. So it’s nice to see that they really do fit.

Burgess: It was personally just cool to see. I don’t think we really started the album cycle intending for it to be a concept album, but then, like Spencer was saying, all the puzzle pieces started to fall into place. It was cool to watch them all come together in this weird, ethereal way and think, “Oh, shit.”

Jordan: It was the first time we’d really made a concept album, and it came together because of the songs. After we’d written a few songs, we realized, “Okay, there are themes here.” Once we recognized those themes, we were able to write the rest of the songs around them. So the songs gave us the theme, and then we wrote more songs around that theme.

Another cool thing — and I don’t think anyone has really noticed — is that the whole tour design was based on “Mirror Mirror,” which wasn’t even out yet. The whole graphic was a mirror, the stage design was based around mirrors, and we were like, “This will make sense eventually.” Obviously, there was also the inversion of the album title. There were a lot of little things that tied together, and I feel like you didn’t really get the full picture until much later, which is cool to me.

Stewart: There’s a lot to chew on.

Lastly, if you were to put Volumes 1 and 2 in a time capsule for someone to look back on in 20 years, what do you hope they take away about who The Band CAMINO was at this moment in time?

Jordan: Oh boy. I feel like they’d be like, “Wow, these guys really captured the depths of humanity.” [Laughs] 

Stewart: I think, like Jeff was talking about, we’re all in our 30s now. We just crossed over into a different time in our lives. We’re young… old. That’s what I always like to think about. It’s interesting because we exited our 20s, and your 20s are for learning what you like and learning what you don’t like. Once you enter your 30s, you start implementing all the things you learned during that time in your life. I do think this record reflects that because, when you’re in your 20s, you’re thinking about relationships a lot. That’s still a huge part of your life, but now Garrison’s been married for six years, and we’re all in long-term relationships. It’s just a different type of growing up. It’s definitely a growing-up record. I hope people see it not as a transitional period, but as a really important, pivotal period for all of us on a personal level.

Jordan: Hopefully, a lot of the themes stand the test of time. It’s about what it feels like to be human, to go through change, heartbreak, and growing up.

Stewart: There’s just a certain maturity and depth to it.

Jordan: Yeah. Now that we’re older than we were when we put out ‘Tryhard’ or any of our first EPs, obviously, there are people who want us to keep making the same thing over and over again. We always want to honour the songs that got us here, and we’re always going to play those songs. We’re not going to go make a jazz fusion record — we’re still going to make music that sounds like The Band CAMINO. But we’ve learned a lot over the past decade, and it feels like we should have the freedom to share that. Maybe we don’t have that much wisdom yet at 30, but it does feel like the older we get, the more depth I want to put into the music.

There are bands that are in their 30s or 40s and are still writing about the exact same things they were writing about when they were 20. I always want there to be room for a fun pop song — like “Holly” is really fun and loose, and there’s always room for that on a record. But I also want there to be an evolution in the thoughtfulness, the depth, and the life lessons in the music. In theory, we’ve all learned a lot and grown a lot as people, so hopefully, we have more to say the older we get.

You want the music to grow as you guys grow. You’re not going to be 19 forever.

Stewart: Exactly. Otherwise, it becomes inauthentic. You want the music to be a reflection of who you are, and I think we did a good job of that.

Jordan: We left it all on the field, baby.

‘NeverAlways Vol. 1 & Vol. 2‘ are out now. Catch The Band Camino on tour this summer with 5 Seconds of Summer.

photography. Kevin Sikorski
talent. The Band Camino
interview. Kelsey Barnes
special thanks. Ted Sullivan @ Atlantic Records
photography assistants. Cameron Curland + Greg O’Connor