When musicians form a new band, usually one of the first goals is live performance. The members of The Brevet wanted to hear their songs in movies and TV shows.

Singer-songwriter and frontman Aric Chase Damm and keyboardist Michael Jones started writing music together in middle school in Southern California, and continued to collaborate when Damm left to study acting at the University of Nebraska. While in college, Damm scored student films and delved into the licensing process for music. When the two reunited in California and formed The Brevet in the early 2010s, they had the connections and experience to get their music featured in films such as “Ashby,” “An Open Secret” and “The Good Lie” and TV shows including “American Idol” and “NCIS New Orleans.”

“The music industry is so — it’s like the Wild West, man. There’s no right way of doing it anymore,” Damm said recently from his home in Southern California, where the band formed in the early 2010s. “Where you enter the music industry — you can enter it like we did, a totally backwards approach. But a lot of people are doing that now, which is the sinkhole world of getting your music published in film. But back in the day, that was a very backwards approach. People were like, ‘What are you doing? Why aren’t you out there playing live shows?’”

But the band’s self-described “epic Americana” sound made for some energetic live shows, and demand for more performances grew. The quintet ramped up its touring schedule in the last year, including slots at festivals such as BottleRock Napa Valley and the Firefly Music Festival in Delaware earlier this year.

This roadwork influenced the band’s upcoming third album, “LEGS” (an acronym for “Like Every Great Story”), a harder-rocking affair than the acoustic-based, 2013 debut album “Battle of the Heart” and its follow-up, “American Novel,” released in three EP installments from 2015 through 2017. Damm and the rest of the band — drummer David Aguiar, guitarist John Kingsley and new members Greg Burroughs on keyboards and Julian Johnson on bass — will return to Volcanic Theatre Pub on Thursday as part of a short tour behind initial singles “Locked & Loaded” and “So Long.”

Those two songs are a good barometer for the rest of the 10-track album, which Damm said should be out sometime in the fall — distorted guitar riffs and thick grooves married to Damm’s dramatic vocal delivery and storytelling approach to songwriting. Damm, the band’s main songwriter with the departure of Jones in the last year, almost exclusively played electric guitar on the songs.

“I grew up actually learning on electric guitar, and then when I picked up acoustic, it changed how I saw songs and how I wrote songs,” Damm said. “And then letting that go for a little bit and then picking up an electric guitar again was such a breath of fresh air for me. It was just a good growth for us as a band. I think it matured us in a lot of ways, and it was the natural next step for where we were heading to with picking up more live shows and whatnot.”

The loss of original bassist Ben Ross and Jones especially also helped bring about the stylistic change.

“Michael and I wrote in a really, really unique way, since we grew up together,” Damm said. “We created in a very interesting way. But this allows me to, in different avenues, stretch, because you become very comfortable, especially growing up with someone. … It’s been a good growth for us as far as (getting the) creative juices going.”

The album’s title, like “American Novel,” alludes to the band’s love of musical storytelling and its continued mission to get its songs on screen. (The group continues its wild success on this front with “Locked & Loaded,” which appeared on the show “Lucifer” in March.) But the songs are perhaps more personal than before, with Damm focusing on the band’s story throughout.

“‘Like Every Great Story’ is our evolution — like with every great story in a novel or whatnot, there’s always struggle, right? There’s always a climax and a struggle,” Damm said. “Our meaning behind it is our struggle and our own path to find what we are as a band. One of the songs, ‘Legs,’ is more of a big story in general, but the overarching theme would be that. There’s a lot of themes within this record of identity and pursuit of happiness and true meaning in life and feeling worthy.”