The Lumineers will 'pepper in' new songs during Pittsburgh stop

The Lumineers qualify as a bona fide hit-making band. Since the group’s debut single, “Ho Hey,” became a 2012 blockbuster single, topping 10 different Billboard magazine singles charts, while spending 62 weeks on Billboard’s all-genre Hot 100 singles chart, the band has enjoyed one success after another.

Listen to those successes as the band plays a Feb. 25 show in Pittsburgh’s PPG Paints Arena.

“Stubborn Love,” the follow-up single from the 2012 self-titled debut album, hit No. 1 on the Adult Alternative Songs chart and the album went triple platinum. Then the second album, 2016’s “Cleopatra,” continued the momentum, hitting No. 1 on Billboard’s album chart and adding three more hit singles to the group’s catalog ­­— “Ophelia,” the title track and “Angela.”

But one won’t hear Wesley Schultz, who along with Jeremiah Fraites makes up The Lumineers, act or talk like he takes the success for granted or will always just crank out one hit song after another.

Cinderella story

“I think I always felt like a Cinderella story with our first album, particularly with ‘Ho Hey,” Schultz said of the bouncy folk-flavored tune in a mid-January phone interview. “ ‘Ho Hey’ didn’t sound like anything on the radio as far as the production. It just felt like lo-fi; and it was like the little engine that could; and it made it really far. But if you were designing a pop song that was going to go that big, I think you wouldn’t have recorded it that way or designed it that way. So it was just a happy accident.”

Perhaps that outlook helps explain why the duo didn’t worry about making their latest album, “III,” fit the profile of a commercially accessible album.

For one thing, it’s a thematic album, with three groups of three songs telling the stories of a mother (Gloria), her son (Jimmy) and Jimmy’s son (Junior) and the addictions that scarred their lives and inflicted pain and chaos on each other and their family members — not exactly the kind of subject matter that fits with the often frothy fare on pop radio today.

The songs don’t so much form a linear story as much as they present a series of snapshots rich in detail that provide a portrait of the lives of Gloria, Jimmy and Junior and how their behavior impacts the family as a whole. It’s a compelling subject and “III” is easily the most ambitious album yet from the Schultz and Fraites, who formed The Lumineers in 2005 and spent the first half dozen years struggling to make headway with their music.

No tidy ending

The nine-song suite (as well as the companion videos for each song directed by Kevin Phillips) that forms the core of “III” doesn’t provide a tidy ending. For Schultz, who drew from his experiences of having someone close to him who has been battling addiction — he says he believes that person is currently homeless — this sort of unresolved ending is appropriate for something as messy as addiction.

“I do think part of what I learned, just by trying to write about it and process it, is that you kind of have to accept that there’s not resolution,” he said. “Even when that person is gone eventually, there’s unfinished business; and there are unanswered questions; and there’s pain. It’s never going to be how in certain TV shows and movies wrap things up.”

For all the damage described throughout the nine songs that form the thematic part of “III” (as something of a postscript, “III” ends with three tunes that are not thematically linked to the previous nine tunes) Schultz also was determined to show another element that sometimes is overlooked when it comes to accounts of addiction.

“There’s a lot of love in this family story. If there wasn’t, no one would feel pain about it,” he said. “I think that was an important lesson, too.”

Musically, “III” retains the spare folk-ish sound that typified the first two The Lumineers albums, with piano or acoustic guitar and vocals at the center of the songs. While some of the songs have buoyant enough melodies to feel accessible to a mass audience (such as the recent Top 5 single in alternative rock, “Gloria,” and “Life in the City”) other tunes demand more of the listener, such as the solemn “My Cell” and stark “Jimmy Sparks.” Still, the songs are well written and the music feels entirely appropriate for the lyrics of each song.

Schultz said the Lumineers plan to play all nine songs from the thematic portion of “III” on tour this winter and spring. But the songs won’t be placed in sequence during the set.

“We’ve tried just about every combination,” Schultz said. “I think, in the beginning, I felt like maybe we should keep the chapters intact, so we’d play chunks of three and then move on to some stuff that was from album one or album two and then go back to another chunk from (album) three.”

That didn’t seem to play well with audiences or feel as seamless as one might expect. Eventually Schultz and Fraites found what seems to be an effective way to incorporate the new songs.

“It holds really well when it’s one or two (songs) at a time,” Schultz said. “It’s just kind of peppering (them) in. That’s kind of what we found works really well.”