For over a decade, Nevertel has been carving out their place in modern rock. What started as high school friends trading riffs in online bands became an explosive force now signed to Epitaph Records. With over 124 million streams and a viral moment that helped launch them onto SiriusXM Octane, the Tampa-based trio of Jeremy Michael (lead vocals), Raul Lopez (rapper/guitarist/producer), and Alec Davis (guitarist) have proven that persistence pays off.
Their upcoming album, Start Again (out September 12th, 2025), is in a sense a rebirth for the band, similar to a “phoenix rising,” as perfectly put by frontman Michael. Learning to start over and roll with the punches, the record marks Nevertel’s boldest and most personal statement yet.
As they prepare to take Start Again on the road for Sleep Theory’s Afterglow Pt II tour, a headline tour in the EU/UK with Rivals, and then supporting Memphis May Fire later this fall, the band sat down with Melodic Magazine to reflect on their journey, the turning points that shaped them, and the second chance that’s fueling their future.
Melodic Magazine: You’ve been a band for over a decade now, how did you all meet and decide you wanted to start a band?
Jeremy: We actually all met in high school. Raul and Alec had known each other previously and were friends before I came into the picture, and we sort of met through a mutual friend to hang out and play music and write music together. The three of us just always stayed together, always made music. We were in and out of bands all throughout high school. There was a period of time where we stopped doing music, [but] we stayed friends.
In 2013–2014 [Raul] saw the Linkin Park Carnivores tour and it inspired him to want to do the whole band thing again. From there we just spent the next nine years writing, producing ourselves, trying to make something happen with the band, trying to get to this point where we are now. A big part of that was just us as friends in the studio, hanging out, writing music, sending each other demos, playing video games.
We’d play Destiny and meet in the Tower (this social space) and we would have our band meetings there, talking about the band, the future, what we wanted to do.
Alec: Literally sit in a circle and have a conversation about it.
Was there a specific turning point that was like, “okay, it’s time”?
Raul: I think when I had moved to Boston, I’d kind of given up on music for probably six months to a year. I didn’t think about it too much ’cause I was just kind of like, “I’m over it, I can’t do it anymore.”
And going to that concert to see Linkin Park truly sparked that fire in me again. I was like, “damn, I felt like I was put on this planet to do that.” That’s always been my dream. Seeing that show genuinely sparked that feeling of wanting to make a band again.
So yeah, that’s when I hit up the boys and was like, “why are we not making music anymore?” Then every day I would get back in there and write songs, and it felt like it did when I was 14 just making random stuff, and the guys were liking it. So we just kept going.
You always think when you make these things, “this is just gonna be a passion project, it’s for fun.” But then as we started developing more, and how serious we felt about it, it started to become like, “oh no, we want to make this band do something massive.”
Linkin Park, since I was a kid, always inspired me. But that specific moment—we always talk about this—was genuine. I remember watching them, almost tearing up, getting goosebumps, and being like, “damn dude, I wanna be on stage again.”
A little more than a year ago you signed with Epitaph Records and you have a new album dropping September 12, CONGRATS! How has it felt working with them on Start Again compared to your past independent releases?
Raul: Yeah, it’s been fantastic. They were just a big addition to the team we’ve built internally. Because for so long we’ve done everything ourselves. And I think Epitaph saw that when they were talking to us about signing, potentially working together. It was like… we were doing this all on our own. We know what it takes. We know how hard the work is (making flyers, promoting your own tour, digital marketing, everything). We did all of that.
So it’s really nice to have a team that welcomed us with open arms and just wanted to make the best thing possible. Epitaph truly feels like family to us, so I love being there.
Jeremy: Yeah, they’re incredible. It was funny, the first thing [Brett Gurewitz] asked us when we had a meeting with them was, “why do you guys need us?” And that’s how we knew we’d found a great partnership. Because we always talked as a band [that] if we’re ever gonna sign, it needs to feel like family. It needs to feel like a partnership. A label that understands what we are as a band, gets us, loves our sound, doesn’t want anything to change, and just wants to support our vision.
It kind of felt impossible, so we were comfortable being independent for a very long time.
Alec: We were ready to keep going independent too.
Jeremy: We’d had a few meetings with labels before Epitaph, but nothing felt like what we envisioned for the band. So we made the decision to just stay independent. We were ready to continue down that path.
And then we got a song, “Everything in My Mind,” on SiriusXM Octane and that’s how Epitaph found us. We were giddy about Epitaph, because there are so many legacy and current bands on their roster that we love.
I didn’t know it could feel this comfortable working with a label in a true partnership. I always feel like they have our best interests at heart, and I’ve never felt like anything they suggest is malicious or meant to change us, which is very nice.
Do you remember what you answered when they were like, “what do you need from us”?
Alec: Raul had a great answer to that. He basically said something along the lines of, “We’ve gotten this team as far as we can on our own, and we just feel like we need help to continue growing this project [and] to make it larger than where we can take it ourselves.”
Jeremy: That’s exactly how we were feeling too. The band was doing pretty well, I think we were at like 500,000 or 600,000 monthly listeners at that time. We were posting content a lot on our own, getting a lot of opportunities ourselves.
But we were also working full-time jobs, and I think we had hit our limit of what we could do even hours-wise. We were just like, “we need a team that can help us, that can work in the background while we continue doing what we’re doing.”
The values align with you guys, your vision and their vision. Which I think goes back to you guys having a really solid foundation, is you don’t have to bring someone else in.
Your new album is coming out in a few weeks. What is the meaning behind the album title Start Again?
Jeremy: It felt like the whole record was about learning to start over, learning to start again, learning to roll with the punches, and make something new out of the ashes, like a phoenix rising. That was always the imagery we had talked about too. It just felt like every time I listened to the record, that name really embodied a lot of what the record was about.
Signing to a label was almost like a do-over for us, another shot to rebrand ourselves and become a new band. It felt like this record, compared to all of our previous music, was the music we’d always wanted to make. I feel like the band we’ve always wanted to sound like. So in a lot of ways, it was just us starting again.
And I felt like that name fits this vibe, it felt like where we were at personally, all of us as a band, as a group. That one line we all wrote, “Am I broken? ’Cause I can’t start again,” just fit everything. When we pitched that, the whole theme for the record came about. We started looking at it that way, thinking about the artwork, what we wanted, and what the message was not only in each individual song, but as a collective of songs.
Raul: As Jeremy was saying, a lot of personal, big changes were happening in our lives. As we were writing the record, we didn’t know that all these songs correlated to each other. But once we put that title with it, it made so much sense to call the album that, because all these songs, subconsciously, we were just writing about that the whole time.
With this album, though there are still some elements of it, your sound has evolved from being more electronic-heavy in earlier projects to a heavier, more rock-driven identity — is there anything that motivated that change or was it a natural progression?
Raul: I think every album we strive to do something a little different than what we’ve done before. Everything In My Mind was electronic and weird in its own ways. And I don’t think whenever we sit down to write a new record, we’re like, “Hey, we gotta make a part two of this.” We just kind of go with whatever we’re feeling.
For this album, we really wanted to make it like this anthemic rock, but still have our roots in there. It’s kind of crazy because we talk about it now, but I rap on this album, not nearly as much as I did before. I’m actually singing a lot more.
So every album, we’re just trying to switch it up, do different things, and push ourselves in different ways. This album, to me, feels like a classic. You could probably listen to this 10 years from now and still feel like it’s fresh and cool.
I agree! If you had to pick one track as the band’s collective favorite, which would it be?
Jeremy: There’s two. “Ever After” and “ICON”. When we wrote [“ICON”] with David Cow and Gianni Taylor in Memphis, we had the instrumental, and then we all just sat down collectively as a group. We worked on the lyrics and the melodies. We did that almost in a day, it was so quick.
We’re big fans of video games and video game soundtrack songs. The crossover of Breaking Benjamin and Halo is something we all love, and we’ve always wanted a song that sounded like it could be in a video game, with that feeling. “ICON” gives us that sort of feeling.
“Ever After” we literally wrote to a Batman trailer. We had a Batman trailer up, playing, because we wanted to create a vibe that felt cinematic. Alec started playing the guitar riff that starts the song, and we just went with it. We started writing lyrics to it, and it fit perfectly.
Another for me is probably “Did It All.” I like it a lot. It’s really energetic, super fun. It feels like a single without being a single, which I like having on the record. It also feels truly Nevertel.
We did a lot of co-writes on this record, which is very new for us. We’ve written and produced everything ourselves for so long. This record was a lot of learning to work with other people, play to your strengths, and navigate the push and pull, the give and take of working with new collaborators.
But “Did It All” was truly a Nevertel song. Just the three of us in Raul’s studio. It felt nice to do that again and make something anthemic and single-worthy. It could have been a single, but it’s still kind of a sleeper on the record that people can discover.
One of the tracks from your album, “Break the Silence” features Sleep Theory — you’ve gone on multiple tours with them, debuted the track at Rockville, and even got to open up for their back-to-back sold-out headlining debut in Memphis last year — what has that friendship meant to you as artists and as people?
Raul: Those are the homies. It’s crazy because it’s rare sometimes to find such a good friend group in the music industry. For us, Sleep Theory is that. It’s been really sick to tour with them together.
It was kind of crazy because “Break the Silence” wasn’t intended to be a collab. We wrote that song and didn’t have any plans for a feature, but I remember we had sent it to Steve [Richards] who was with Cullen at the time on tour. Cullen just literally called us and was like, “Bro, we gotta make this a collab.” And I was like, “you know what? Let’s try it.”
It just happened, that camaraderie, and we’re going through similar things at the same time, so we can connect in that sense.
Speaking of Sleep Theory, you’re about to head back out on tour with them, head over to headline the EU/UK tour with Rivals, and then you’re joining Memphis May Fire on the Shapeshifter tour. But before you return to the stage, Start Again comes out! Are there specific songs from the album that you already know will be added into the setlist?
Raul: We’re still working on the set, finalizing what that would be for sure for Europe. Most of the record’s gonna be on those European headline days.
But as far as the Sleep Theory tour and Memphis [May Fire], we’re still working on what we’re gonna incorporate. I think for sure one we can say is, obviously — just because we enjoy it and really wanna see how it does live — is “Ever After” and “Did It All,” for sure.
We’re for sure gonna play new stuff. We’ve been playing all the older songs that [fans] saw us play this year. Now it’s onto some of the new music.
Any cities or tours you’re looking forward to?
Raul: I’m excited to go back to Seattle. I love Seattle as a city. I want to play Japan really bad.
Jeremy: Sylvee’s gonna be great again. [Last time] they went crazy. They went nuts. They were crowd surfing from the first verse of the first song, it was a sea of people.
Alec: There are a couple House of Blues that we’re returning to. And I’m personally really excited to go across the pond. I’ve only been to Europe twice and didn’t really get to travel too much beyond the tour group thing. So this time it’ll be a lot more boots on the ground with my homies, getting to actually experience these new places with my friends, doing my own thing that is catered by us rather than just going on some pre-existing trip.
Jeremy: I think we’re all really excited for Europe. I’ve never been to Europe personally, so the UK, I’m a big fan of Harry Potter. I just wanna see the UK from Platform Nine and Three-Quarters. I’m personally really excited for the Netherlands too. The Netherlands is just so beautiful.
Exploring Platform Nine and Three-Quarters will be so much fun!
What do you all do to pass the time on the road when you’re not playing shows? Do you have individual hobbies or fun band activities that keep you sane?
Alec: Playing video games, watching movies, painting drum heads, signing Pokémon cards, all sorts of little arts-and-crafts things to keep us busy. 20 Questions. A lot of I Spy, ’cause the internet’s not very good out there in the middle of nowhere.
Jeremy: There are big, long drives sometimes, especially through Texas, where there’s just nothing around. So you’re basically just relying on card games. We have Uno. It’s good to have some offline stuff to do. We have Steam Decks, which are basically little handheld consoles that use your Steam library.
Alec: A lot of sleeping.
With Start Again marking such a new chapter, where do you see Nevertel heading over the next decade?
Alec: International tours. Headlining.
Jeremy: Festivals. It’d be really sick to do Rock am Ring [in Nürburg, Germany]. I think all of us have watched the Lincoln Park Rock Am Ring live performance. It’d just be really cool, a full circle moment, to be able to be in that position as the band and live out that fantasy live. That would be so sick.
Alec: It’d also be pretty cool to do the 10-year anniversary of Start Again.
Finally, if you could describe the energy of this new era of Nevertel in just three words, what would they be?
Jeremy: Never give up. I think [that] is probably it, ‘cause I mean, we never did with the band. Every band’s on a different timeline and for us, it took nine years to get here; to be able to be touring the world and playing our music in front of the crowds we’ve always wanted to, and doing the things we’ve always wanted to.
For some bands, it happens so much quicker. It happens within a year or two, three years, four years. But some bands have to crawl tooth and nail, fight their way to get to the position they want to be in.
We always had this vision, and we never gave up. A lot of our friends in high school who had bands went on to leave music or stopped doing it together, even if it was their passion, because they had to get a job, get a house, just live.
We always found a way to make it work, in every scenario. And then Start Again, too. It’s just like… never give up. Never give up on yourself. There’s always a way. There’s always a way forward.
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