Technology and openness to new ideas color Taking Back Sunday’s latest album ’152’

Twenty-five years into a successful music career, one might expect a band to embrace routine. But veteran rock group Taking Back Sunday is still checking items off of its bucket list — including playing at both the Coachella and Bonnaroo festivals this year — and exploring new territory in the studio.

For its latest album, “152,” the band tried an entirely new approach: working with Australian producer Tushar Apte, whose credits include K-pop giants BTS and Blackpink, as well as pop star Demi Lovato and rapper Nicki Minaj.

“When we started working on ‘152,’ we spent a long time meandering — not having a specific thing to chase,” explains Taking Back Sunday frontman Adam Lazzara, the NC native and longtime Charlotte resident who plays a hometown show at The Fillmore with TBS Thursday.

The group was introduced to Apte while working with EDM producer and celebrity DJ Steve Aoki for one of his solo projects.

“He was collaborating with artists from different genres,” Lazzara says. “He had a show in Charlotte, so that night we brought everyone down and recorded at Sioux Sioux Studio after his show.” The juxtaposition of Apte’s background in R&B, pop, and electronic music — and Taking Back Sunday’s roots in punk, hard rock, and emo — ended up being the motivation Taking Back Sunday needed.

Lazzara, for one, was fascinated by watching Apte and Aoki work.

“Toward the end of tracking, the four of us (in TBS) standing outside by the car decided, ‘We need to work with this guy,’” Lazzara recalls. “He’d never heard of our band. Most anybody else we’d work with already has an idea of what we do and who we are in their mind. In working with them anything is going to lean that way. Instead, we wanted to try something so sick and see how it worked out. That day at Sioux was the turning point. From there forward, we had a direction.”

Lazzara admits he had tended to take an old-school approach to recording and technology before working with Apte.

“It flipped my whole world on its head,” he says. “Watching Steve and Tushar work, I just started looking at (the technology), seeing it and hearing it in real time — as opposed to watching a YouTube video or reading an article about it — and seeing how my line of thinking has been wrong. It just made me realize, Why wouldn’t you use the tools on hand? You can just do so much.

“I’ve found myself being more open-minded now than I can remember ever being when it comes to music. Not hearing the genre or seeing what it’s categorized as and making a judgment. That really helped me with that,” adds Lazzara, whose tastes have long expanded outside of the hard-rock and punk circles TBS fit in. His latest favorite is R&B artist Dijon.

Yet “152” still sounds like Taking Back Sunday.

“No matter what we do,” he says, “because it’s the four of us, it would still sound like us. We first realized that when we were working on (2016’s) ‘Tidal Wave.’ When we first listened back to it, we thought we were leaning too hard toward The Clash or pop-punk. But listening again, we realized, ‘This is just another thing we can do.’”

Although they remain the same band sonically, Lazzara is wary of getting trapped in nostalgia — given the band’s status as one of the most influential acts to spring from the early-2000s’ emo explosion.

Case in point:

At Bonnaroo this year, Dashboard Confessional’s Chris Carabba headed up the festival’s first emo-themed SuperJam, even covering Taking Back Sunday’s “MakeDamnSure” with Circa Survive’s Anthony Green. Fans probably found themselves wishing TBS could have gotten in on that one, especially since the band was also playing the festival. And the idea had been broached. “Chris had reached out to me to ask about doing it months ago,” Lazzara says.

Taking Back Sunday — which performed on a different day at Bonnaroo — did have a legitimate scheduling conflict that would have prevented the band from making an appearance with Carabba and Green. Even if it hadn’t, however, Lazzara would have been conflicted by that desire to avoid pigeonholing his band by not associating it strictly with what they once were.

“My response back was I’d love to do it. Chris is one of my favorite people, and I knew Anthony was going to be there. But if it’s branded as this big emo thing, I can’t. He understood.”

If you go: Taking Back Sunday

When: 8 p.m. Thursday, Aug. 8.

Where: The Fillmore Charlotte, 820 Hamilton St.

Tickets: $59.

Details: www.ticketmaster.com; www.livenation.com.