LAS VEGAS — Chatting about their just-released new album at a small club off Fremont Street downtown, Atlanta rockers Starbenders seem relieved.

Take Back the Night is a raised middle finger to the doom-and-gloom of the pandemic and everything else the band has had to overcome in recent years to still be standing. This includes bassist Aaron Lecesne nearly dying after catching necrotizing pneumonia while on tour in the U.K. in the summer of 2022.

“It was starting to feel like many things were being taken from us, including the night,” frontwoman and cofounder Kimi Shelter said of the pandemic. “It started to feel, as we progressed through the pandemic, that it would be something we would need to take back.”

Lecesne and Shelter started the band nearly a decade ago, with producer Nico Constantine, after a previous project fell apart. At that time, the two were trying to figure out their own place in the world. About a year later, they were joined by guitarist Kriss Tokaji. After performing with a different drummer initially, the band added Emily Moon in 2017.

“You have to have a killer drummer,” said Shelter, lounging in the greenroom of the Sand Dollar, her bandmates to both sides of her on various couches. “When Emily came, my writing changed; my singing changed. I had to learn how to sing over her loud-ass drumming.”

Starbenders have now released three long-players, the last two of them on Sumerian Records (which brought the band to this Vegas artist showcase). Over the last decade, the band has created not just a collection of sounds influenced equally by hard rock, glam, goth, metal and punk, but a look—skin, spandex, mascara and in Moon’s case, well-placed electrical tape.

While the band pulls from the likes of Van Halen, Jimi Page, David Bowie, KISS, New York Dolls, T. Rex and Joan Jett, Shelter grew up playing classical violin from an early age and brought that influence in as well.

A couple of hours later, Starbenders put on a whirling dervish on stage. All four were constantly on the move, jumping and striking poses amid their blistering riffs and menacing bass thumps. In the middle of it all was Shelter, a cross between Jett, Pat Benatar and the Cure’s Robert Smith in black leather pants, white leather boots, a poofy white cravat and matching sleeves.

She was equally adept at belting away and letting out blood-curdling screams.

“I wrote this song with my shameless love of guitars… Did music save your life like it saved mine?” she announced before kicking the band into single “The Game.”

The band members are a lot more mellow when they’re not on stage. In fact, when they’re not working on music, Moon and Lecesne are crafters, and both love to work on their trucks. The drummer still gets a Lego set for Christmas every year. The bassist’s side project is upcycling clothes. Shelter and Tokaji are both into exercise.

“If you do it right, rock and roll is a full-time job,” Lecesne said.

To that end, the four are excited to get back on the road, which started with an Aftershock Festival slot and continues with a U.K. headlining tour—Shelter said she’s looking forward to the gloomy and gothy fall vibes there—and North American tour with labelmates Des Rocs.

“I think we’re really feeling… the energy of this album is something we’re really channeled into,” Tokaji said. “All the songs are really aggressive, and they represent our live show better than the last album. It makes it easy to play them live.”

Take Back the Night is a sonically diverse album, from the riffage on “The End Is Near” to the tempo changes of “Blood Moon,” and the much more nuanced, quieter and melodic moments on songs like the poppy “Cherry Wine” and the angsty “We’re Not OK,” on which Shelter questions her own faith.

Shelter pointed out that in the past, before success was determined by streaming numbers and social media followers, bands were freer to be anything they wanted to be at any time. That’s what allowed bands like Cheap Trick to put songs like “Dream Police” and “Gonna Raise Hell” on the same album.

She said she doesn’t want to feel pressure to be any one thing, and her philosophy is just to “fuckin’ let it rip.”

Being from Atlanta, the band pulls influence from Southern hip-hop acts like Outkast as well. Shelter said it manifests in different ways but is more present on songs like “Seven White Horses,” which combines a rhymed delivery alongside the melody.

“The Cure said it best, ‘Tuesday you can fall apart, and then Friday, you can be in love,’” she said. “When you’re a rock band that’s getting in a room and playing together, you’re going to have the full spectrum of the human experience. You can be soft. That makes the heavy things even more crushing because there needs to be contrast, and it’s something that happens naturally.”

The band doesn’t sit around and try to question motivations, and trusts Constantine (who’s worked with the likes of Lady Gaga) and its Sumerian team to guide them.

The album even includes a cover of Alice Cooper’s “Poison.” Starbenders are fans of its songwriter, Desmond Child, and Constantine suggested they take on its numerous sonic twists and turns. Elsewhere on the album, the band was joined by New Orleans songwriter James Hall, and Nashville songwriter Scott Stevens helped Shelter out with “The Game.”

Thematically, pandemic-induced isolation is both purposeful and accidental. It wasn’t until the album was done that someone pointed out to Shelter that she kept bringing up her room in her lyrics, comparing it to a tomb and a place she had to escape. The band members were scared they’d never get to play shows again, she said. The goal became to make the record as close to a Starbenders concert as possible, even—as Tokaji said—some of the darkness seeped in.

But now, the band is ready to have some fun and get that pent-up anxiety out. In Vegas that meant a performance that resembled a tornado, which Tokaji said he’s used to hearing and appreciates.

“We’re a lot more aggressive live than people think,” he said. “They’re like, ‘Wow. You guys are fucking frightening live.’”

Follow Roman Gokhman at Twitter.com/RomiTheWriter.