“In every odyssey, there comes a time when you must accept that what you are pursuing is no longer a rational decision,” Scott Terry writes in the liner notes of Red Wanting Blue’s latest album, The Wanting. “It’s a choice that does not feel like a choice. It is a hunger.”

Produced by acclaimed singer/songwriter Will Hoge, The Wanting showcases Red Wanting Blue at their finest, with Terry’s epic, heartfelt vocals soaring above the band’s gritty, driving rock and roll. Alternately triumphant and melancholic, the songs are both muscular and nuanced, equally at home blasting from a car stereo as they are drifting through a pair of headphones late on some lonely night. Though the record draws on many of the band’s traditional strengths—indelible melodies, infectious hooks, explosive performances—the making of it pushed Red Wanting Blue far outside their comfort zone and forced them to take an unprecedented, nearly year-long break from touring.

It’s that insatiable appetite for the road that helped Red Wanting Blue establish themselves as one of the indie world’s most enduring and self-sufficient acts. Hailed as “Midwestern rock heroes” by American Songwriter, the band has spent most of their career operating outside of the confines of the traditional music industry, earning their legion of lifelong fans through decades of relentless touring. Over the course of ten studio albums, they brought their passionate, unforgettable live show to every city and town that would have them, blazing their own distinctive trail through the American heartland as they built up the kind of fanatically dedicated audiences normally reserved for arena acts. Along the way, they notched appearances everywhere from Letterman to NPR and climbed all the way up to #3 on the Billboard Heatseekers chart. In 2016, they celebrated with a 20th anniversary retrospective album/concert film entitled ‘RWB20 Live at Lincoln Theater,’ which captured the band in all their glory at a sold-out hometown show in Columbus, OH.

Despite the group’s distinctly Midwestern beginnings, the origins of The Wanting lie not in Ohio, or even in Brooklyn (where Terry currently resides), but rather in Mexico. It was there, on a day off during the band’s sixth annual trip aboard the Rock Boat cruise, that the seeds of collaboration with fellow performer Will Hoge were sown.

For the first time ever, the band decided to switch things up and cleared their touring schedule for the better part of a year to focus solely on writing, recording, and mixing the most fully realized material of their career. If it’s hunger that drives Red Wanting Blue, then it’s love that sustains them: love for the band, love for their fans, love for the journey. After all, desire is nothing without love, and The Wanting is nothing if not a testament to the power of desire. “It is beyond reason that the heart wants what it wants…yet still it persists,” Terry concludes in the liner notes. “I imagine wherever there is the breath of life….with it will be the wanting.”