During the height of the pop-punk emo era, The Maine’s 2008 album Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop had every teenage girl within a 10-mile radius in a rabid, lovesick chokehold. If you weren’t swooning to John O’ Callaghan’s lead vocals on “Into Your Arms,” you were uploading “Everything I Ask For” to your MySpace page.  

But my, how The Maine has grown—and so has its fans. Over the last 17 years, The Maine has evolved into a full-fledged alternative rock band with its own festival, nine studio albums and decades of experience between its five core members. With Joy Next Door, the band’s 10th studio album set to release on April 10, we caught up with drummer Pat Kirch about making their toughest LP yet and why he’s excited for their 8123 fanbase to hear the record for the first time at Brooklyn Bowl on March 24.  

I saw you guys as a teenager performing at the Henderson Pavilion almost 20 years ago. It’s surreal to be here talking to you about album No. 10.  

I cannot believe it. It feels like we've been doing it forever, but at the same time, it feels like we just began. I think for us, that's the biggest thing: It still feels like we're working for something, and it feels like we're putting everything we have into making the best albums possible and the best tours as we can. I didn't think it would be possible to still be doing it for this long, but now that we're here, I can't imagine us ever doing anything different. 

Vegas is the first stop on the tour, but it’s been quite some time since you’ve properly played here. How’s it feel to finally return?  

It’s awesome. Because of the When We Were Young fest, we haven't played a headlining show in Vegas in like ... I don't even know when the last time it was. It was a very long time ago. So that feels exciting to be back in the place and actually to be able to bring people a full show and an experience that they haven't had with our band in a while. It’ll be our first time performing songs off the new record like ever at that Vegas show.  

I know you’ve said before that each album correlates with a different color and mood. Joy Next Door represents green. What does that color mean for you guys emotionally as a band?  

This time period and this era of the band is about showcasing us in the most natural way possible. There's a lot of acoustic instruments on the album, and there isn't a lot of computer trickery going on. It feels very much just like an organic representation of the band. And I think that's the plan for the tour as well, to showcase us as a band and not relying on LED video walls behind us. Over the course of 20 years, we've built up a chemistry between the five of us. So the tour is really about the showcasing of that.   

John O'Callaghan said the track “Die to Fall” is about him having a dialogue with himself about wanting to let go. Does that feel like a running theme with this album? Allowing yourself to relinquish control?  

I think it's about coming to terms with the fact that things are always going to be difficult, and that happiness isn't a destination that you get to, it's just this constant thing. It's all about coming to terms with the anxieties of life that don't end. … At the same time, coming to terms with that, that's not a bad thing if you can have the mindset of continuing to want to grow and understanding that there isn't an end destination. … For a band that's been around for this long, there's a lot of parallels of what it's like to be in a band, and it's a constant up and down, and you have to make it all work.

If you love something, it's going to be difficult because you're going to pour so much of yourself into it. Making the album was super hard, and I think that's because we've done it now 10 times. So, if you don't want to just recycle what you've done before, it takes a lot of digging to get to a new place. I'm not going to say the album was fun to make, because it was very hard. But when I heard the whole album done for the first time, it had me in tears because it just felt so good, and I was so proud that we pushed through the difficulties. 

You guys came out of the pop-punk era but you’ve really grown above that and matured your sound. What were you eager to experiment with on this album that you hadn’t had a chance to yet for previous projects?  

The modern way of making albums is you're gonna go in with a producer that you've never met and make a song in a day, and then you're gonna do that 20 times, and then a record label is going to tell you these ones sound like they'd be big on Tiktok, let's put them out. For us, the inspiration is to make an album, to make a piece of work that feels like it goes somewhere.  

We recorded the album in chronological order from the first song to the last song, and so we could really figure out how we wanted it to go into each other. We're inspired by artists like Wilco and Tom Petty, the same artists that have inspired us forever, but to really dig deeper into challenging ourselves to take the time to make it important.  

I think our fans want to hear a body of work. We don't have one song that we have to play every show. Some of our more popular songs from the first couple albums, we haven't played in 15 years, and then we bring them back every once in a while. We like the idea that we're making a body of work. The inspiration, I guess, was to make a record and to have it feel as natural as possible and keep the takes as natural as we can, and so people will appreciate that. All that we can do is make what we love.  

How do you want those fans to feel walking out of Brooklyn Bowl, having experienced all this?

I want them to feel like they were a part of a community for the night. There's something within our fan base and the 8123 family that’s this unspoken thing, and people get this feeling of being a part of it. Some of it has to do with us in the show, but a lot of it has to do with the collection of people in the room all being there for the same purpose. I want them to be speechless, because they felt something that is hard to put into words and hopefully it's something that they'll keep with them forever. 

THE MAINE March 24, 5:30 p.m., $57. Brooklyn Bowl, ticketmaster.com.