Submitted photoGenders! kick off the Summer Concert Series at 6 tonight at Crow’s Feet Commons in Bend.

For lots of bands, a first full tour of the United States involves long van rides to small venues in unfamiliar towns, playing to meager audiences, occasionally dealing with shady promoters, and sleeping in cheap motels, on floors, or worse.

So Genders’ first national tour was a really good one, relatively speaking: The Portland-based quartet was invited by Idaho indie rock giants Built to Spill to warm up its crowds at a slew of shows across the country in late 2013.

The experience was amazing, but also gave Genders a false sense of life on tour, says guitarist Stephen Leisy.

“You’re getting paid every night. You’re playing for a bunch of people. There’s tons of food in the green room,” he says in a telephone interview. “It was a total fantasy.”

That was driven home a few months later, when Genders toured again and returned to towns they’d played with Built to Spill to try to capitalize on whatever renown they’d generated. The tour was fun, Leisy says, but the band battled van problems and the shows weren’t as well-attended as hoped.

“It’s hard to get people out to shows in cities you’ve played once,” he says.

Genders has never played Bend, but that will change Tuesday when the band makes the drive over the mountains to rock the plaza outside Crow’s Feet Commons (see “If you go”). Leisy will be joined onstage by singer/guitarist Maggie Morris, drummer Katherine Paul and bassist Matt Hall, who is playing his final shows with band.

Leisy, Morris and Hall started Genders in 2012 after the dissolution of their previous band, Youth, which crumbled under singer/guitarist Elec Morin’s airtight artistic vision.

“We’d have ideas and they’d be a little crazy at first, and he would not want to explore them,” Leisy says. “We just sort of realized that whenever we had those weird ideas, that’s when we were having the most fun.”

In late 2013, Genders released its debut album, “Get Lost,” which isn’t particularly weird, but it does fit snugly into the canon of Pacific Northwest indie rock, setting Morris’ melancholy melodies against a mosaic of electric guitar crunch and serrated psychedelia. Its 12 songs are packed with unabashed pop hooks but also enshrouded with an overcast vibe; it is obvious why Built to Spill took a liking to this band.

A year and a half later, Genders is working on a follow-up. After the band got home from that second, smaller and more challenging tour, its members got day jobs and had a tough time scheduling band activities. Hall took a teaching gig outside Portland and eventually decided to leave the group (though, as noted, he will play in Bend). Eventually, everyone took some time away from Genders to relax and recharge, Leisy says.

“I think we’d been kind of burning ourselves out and … we were hitting a spot where it was hard to make everybody happy. It seemed a little stressful,” he says. “Sometimes really all you need, especially with creative stuff, is just to relax a little bit. It’s a lot easier to create that way.”

It worked. Back from the break, the band brought in Toby Tanabe to play bass and has begun working on songs to fill out a sophomore full-length. The guys from Portland’s The Helio Sequence are going to help ’em finish it. And Genders generally feels more ready to ride out the ups and downs of being a band, Leisy says.

“We definitely learned something about the arc of success or whatever you want to call it, because we had that (Built to Spill) tour and we played a show with Alt-J (in Portland) and we played some shows with The Helio Sequence, and then it started to fizzle and that’s kind of around the time we got tired,” he says. “So we definitely learned that, as a band, you release something, cool things happen, and then you really have to knuckle down and get to work again.”

— Reporter: bsalmon@bendbulletin.com