Brett Kohler will tell you the track order on No Particular Reason happened by accident, and for about five minutes, sitting in a room with the rest of The Detours and their producer, it might have felt that way. But nothing about how the album opens, dips, and rises back up was left to chance. The record starts with a bang and takes you through peaks and valleys on purpose, the same way a Detours live show does. Brett wanted the full experience, not just eleven songs in a row.

“Lonely in LA” started the way a lot of Brett’s songs seem to start, alone, on a couch, in a one-bedroom apartment in Hollywood. He had a documentary about Laurel Canyon playing in the background, all ’60s and ’70s music scene, and a chorus he’d been sitting on for a while, just another lonely day in LA. A quiet Saturday afternoon did the rest.

That same instinct for image shows up in how Brett describes “Tide Roll In.” Ask him what the song looks like and he doesn’t hesitate. Palm trees silhouetted on the edge of a beach, the sun setting, a little mist coming off the top of a wave. It’s almost the same picture as the single cover, which makes sense. For Brett, the sound and the image were never two separate things.

Not every song on the album traces back to a good day. “Letting Go” and “It’s Goin Down” carry the weight of the quiet season the band came out of, the same stretch of stillness and recovery that first put a guitar in Brett’s hands. He doesn’t go much further than that, and the album doesn’t need him to. Sometimes the detour is the journey, and those two tracks are where that idea lives loudest.

Then there’s “Losers Club,” which Brett will be the first to admit he got wrong at first. He cut it slower, more melancholy, and figured that was the song. The band had other ideas. They sped it up, added horns, built out the intro, and turned it into something Brett never saw coming, a track that now gets a room moving every time they play it live.

The album’s one cover, “Runnin Down a Dream,” isn’t there for the name recognition. It’s the song The Detours played at their very first show, at the Viper Room, before they had a name for themselves or a plan for what came next. It’s stayed in the set ever since, a raucous way to close things out, and it fits an album about chasing dreams and believing in your own goals a little too well not to include.

The record ends on “Chasing,” which is exactly what it sounds like. Brett wants the last song to leave the room with something good in it, positivity, happiness, the sense that this is a band that believes in what it’s doing and isn’t slowing down anytime soon. They’re chasing the dream, he says, for no particular reason. Of course.

No Particular Reason is out October 3rd. For more on how The Detours got here, watch our earlier conversation with Brett.