Twelve years after their first practice in Boulder, The Velveteers still film their own videos, still play all day and still chase the album they haven’t made yet. Next stop: Europe.
I asked Baby Pottersmith what a Velveteers show offers that streaming can’t, and the answer came fast.
“The volume is stuck at the highest possible setting, you know,” Pottersmith said. “So you can’t turn it down even if you wanted to.”
“I think it’s just really, really in your face live,” Demi Demitro said. “There’s just so much energy at our shows that I think it’s very palpable, and you can really feel it. Everyone’s sweaty.”
Demitro and Pottersmith met as teenagers in Boulder and have been the core of the band ever since, with Demitro on guitar and vocals and Pottersmith on drums. Live, The Velveteers play as a double-drum band, with a touring member on the second kit.
That energy has carried the band a long way. The Velveteers have opened for The Black Keys, Smashing Pumpkins, Greta Van Fleet and Guns N’ Roses. They’ve made two records with Dan Auerbach and booked their first run through Europe.
Making the record
A Million Knives was released in February 2025 on Auerbach’s label, Easy Eye Sound. It was the band’s second album with Auerbach behind the board, following Nightmare Daydream. This time, he pushed them somewhere new. For Demitro, that meant taking her vocals higher than she usually writes them.
“He would have me sing really high on some songs, which was something I wasn’t used to doing,” Demitro said. “I think I have a decently large range, but when I’m writing stuff, I’m writing in a lower key. But he would have me sing the octave. So there were a lot of times I was kind of learning to sing again, because he wanted some of the vocal melodies I had written to be even higher.”
For Pottersmith, it meant doing everything twice. “He had us double everything on the album, no matter what it was,” Pottersmith said. “It was like we played the album twice on top of each other.”
Doubling is standard for vocals. You record a take, then record it again underneath to make it bigger and thicker. Auerbach applied it to every instrument.
“We would be doing double drums live, and then he would have us double that on top of the double drums,” Pottersmith said. “It was challenging, ’cause it can easily turn into a mess and sound really bad. But it worked out.”
The band pushed back in its own way. Easy Eye Sound is known for vintage production, and The Velveteers had tried to bring drum machines into past sessions without success. “So on A Million Knives we really pushed for adding in some more modern elements,” Demitro said.
“They have this typically more 60s and 70s production style,” Pottersmith said. “And hearing that method with the influences that we’re bringing, which is drawing from some 90s and 2000s rock music, hearing those two worlds collide, I feel like anything we did with that production just sounded fresh and cool.”
Doing it themselves
The DIY scene that raised them in Colorado still runs in the band. “It’s like a 100% almost exactly the same as it has ever been in how we’ve run our band,” Pottersmith said. “When we make music videos, it’s literally just Demi and I filming and doing everything. And with touring, we bring our friends. We don’t know how to do it any other way, ’cause we just grew up in the DIY scene.”
So much of the industry isn’t music, Pottersmith said, and doing the work themselves keeps them connected to the art. “We still record a lot of our own things in our garage or in our bedroom, because that’s what reminds us as to why we like doing this.”
Some of the teenage plans held up. “Like 12 years ago when we started the band, we would talk about interviews of our favorite bands and how they were saying they were practicing like eight hours a day and doing crazy shit,” Pottersmith said. “I wasn’t sure if we would still be doing that 12 years later, but we still do that.” Not every day, Pottersmith added, but there are long stretches where the two of them play in a room all day for weeks on end.
Demitro went further than she dreamed. “Working with Dan Auerbach, that was something that I never could have imagined in my dreams,” Demitro said. “My 15-year-old self would’ve been like, ‘Whoa. That’s crazy.’”
Staying loud
The Velveteers don’t adjust for the crowd. Whether they’re opening or headlining, the set doesn’t change. “I think we just try to be us no matter what the environment is,” Pottersmith said.
A Prada event at the Hotel Chelsea earlier this year proved it. “We were discussing the set list, and we were like, ‘Listen, they asked us to come do this show. Let’s just do our normal show,’” Demitro said. “Knowing that we’re probably gonna kind of scare some people there, ’cause we’re a very loud band. We’re not gonna pretend to be someone else just because of the space or who’s in the audience. And if they like it, they like it, and if they don’t like it, then they don’t like it, and that’s rock and roll.”
What’s next
Pottersmith is still chasing something. “I still am like, I wanna make the album we were meant to make, you know, or the best album we can make,” Pottersmith said. “And I just know we haven’t done that yet, which is really exciting to me, ’cause that inspiration I felt at our first practice is just still very much alive and fueling what we do.”
The band has spent much of this year writing. In September, The Velveteers announced the Child of the Universe Tour: 22 dates from Feb. 11 to March 7, 2027. It opens in Lyon, France, and closes in Milan. The run marks the band’s first trip through mainland Europe and a long-awaited return to the UK, with stops in Bristol, Manchester, Glasgow, Nottingham, Brighton and London’s Oslo venue on Feb. 18.
Europe has been warned. The volume stays where it is.
All photos by Bela Kershisnik (@infocuswithyou).
