Umphrey’s McGee celebrated 20 years of hard-rocking riffs and mind-bending grooves with two albums last year: “It’s Not Us,” released in January 2018, and “It’s You,” which dropped in May. The sextet, which formed in South Bend, Indiana, in the late ’90s, has been an integral part of the jam-band scene while standing apart from its peers with its progressive tendencies and holistic approach to improvisation. Ahead of the band’s first Bend show in more than 15 years, at the Midtown Ballroom on Thursday, percussionist Andy Farag chatted with GO! Magazine about new music, the improvisation process and why the group always felt at home on the jam-band scene.

Q: Now that last year’s albums, “It’s Not Us” and “It’s You,” have been out for a while, how have the songs been received by audiences, and how have they changed with live improvisation?

A: It’s been going good. We’ve been playing a large chunk of them. A handful of them we play here and there, but there’s also a good chunk of them that we’ve been playing a lot, and it’s nice to get to a point where we’re really comfortable with those songs. We learned those songs, but we didn’t play them live until the album was released, so we sat on them for a long time, so it’s almost like we had to relearn them once the album came out.

Q: When you record songs before playing them live, or vice-versa, how does that affect the process?

A: There’s a bunch of different ways we come up with new music. We can listen to past improvs and try and take sections from those and piece together a song, or Brendan (Bayliss, guitarist and vocalist) will write a song, Jake (Cinninger, guitarist and vocalist) will write a song. Anybody in the band will write a song and just bring it to the table. For when we’re going into the studio, we always try to work on new material. We try and get new songs, so we write that song as a studio track. But we’re not limited to how long a song is or whatever. We don’t have a record company saying, “Hey, this has gotta have certain songs that are three minutes long, blah, blah, blah.”

Q: In the band’s website biography, Bayliss states, “We’re starting to find our identity.” That’s an interesting thing for a band with 20-plus years of history to say; do you agree with that statement, and what identity is the band working toward?

A: Yeah, I mean, I kind of agree with that. Me personally, me as a drummer and percussionist, I’m never really satisfied. I’m always trying to get better, and there’s no hardcore sense of contentment. I’m always trying to get better and better, and even though we’ve been doing this for 20-plus years, I think all of us are just trying to really give more, be a more cohesive piece and learning … when to play and when not to play. When you have six guys, certain things can get a little note-y. I think as we get older, we’re more comfortable in our instruments, and therefore we’re more comfortable in creating more space.

Q: Umphrey’s McGee has always had more of a metal or progressive-rock streak when compared with other jam bands of the late ’90s and early 2000s. When you guys started, was it difficult to find your place in the scene?

A: When we started, the scene itself was in — it was basically the start of just an influx of a bunch of bands coming out, and it created this scene of a lot more festivals to do, a lot more — we could go to different parts of the country away from our local area and do shows. It wasn’t till later that we were like, you know, the jam band scene is our scene and they accept us, but at the same time we’d like to expand out into a more progressive rock scene or a more rock ’n’ roll kind of scene and not just be known as just a jam band, because even our improvs are very structured and based off a lot of cues. Sometimes the jam-band moniker gets misunderstood as though we’re just going up there and just kind of — I don’t know what the word is — just messing around, slopping around, not really thinking about what we’re doing. Our improvs, pretty much, we’re just literally trying to write songs on the fly.

Umphrey’s McGee, with Ghost-Note: 7 p.m. Thursday, doors open at 6 p.m.; $29.50 plus fees; Midtown Ballroom, 51 NW Greenwood Ave., Bend; midtownbend.com or 541-408-4329

— Brian McElhiney, The Bulletin