The concept of genre in music feels like it is quickly becoming a thing of the past. While there’s many byproducts of the streaming era, both good and bad, one of the positives is that a massive amount of music is available to influence artists with just the click of a button. For Austin-based duo Missio, who play Vivarium on Saturday night, genre is non-existent. The band can pull from just about anywhere and create their sound, which they’ve done across five albums, including this past May’s five-part album “I Am Cinco.” Ahead of Saturday night’s show, we caught up with Matthew Brue and David Butler during the beginning of their tour:

OMC: So you’re a few shows in so far, how have the opening nights of the tour been going?

Brue: They were awesome. We started in Albuquerque, and that was the first time that we played a show there. The fans  were honestly amazing. So energetic, and they were just ready to party, which feels awesome. It's cool to have a headlining show because we have our fans who really know the music well and they're singing all the lyrics back to us. Phoenix was a sold out show for us, our first sellout in that city, which is really cool. We got to experience those fans as well. So thus far the first two shows have been off to a great start.

OMC: Let’s talk about your record. “I Am Cinco” is broken up into five parts. 26 songs are on it. Why go with that much music in one project, instead of breaking things up and doing two full length albums over time?

Butler: This was a really creative artistic record for us, and it started with a lot of inspiration. We had a lot of songs that we'd written that we were really happy with. The whole first half of this album cycle of writing, we already had like an album's worth of songs and we were still writing. We started seeing some obvious groupings. In terms of like the way we've always kind of been diverse, writing in a lot of genres, so we just decided to go all in on that direction and have each little group or discourse. Spotify makes us call them discs because they can't really label the project.

It’s basically five different EPs. “I Am Cinco” or I am five. I’m all of these things in one. I'm not just one thing. I'm not just one sound. That’s what we were feeling in the moment of writing this album. So it's sort of a concept album when you look at it like that, because each individual section is really for musically its own genre, but it's also emotionally centered around a theme of, you know, being sad, being angry, all at once.

OMC: While you're making an album like that with so many different components to it, is there ever anything that feels like it should be off limits? Anything that, when you're making it, you're like, “this just doesn't fit anywhere”?

Butler: Yeah, there were surprisingly a couple of really good songs that we finished that didn't make the album. Ultimately it wasn't so much that they didn't fit, it started to feel like maybe there was some redundancy in terms of having expressed that feeling in this moment already. It would start to take the album out of balance. Each section felt appropriate, and we didn't want to have one really long album. So it needed to all be kind of flowy. That's really what it came down to.

OMC: When you're putting together a live set, and you have all of these different pieces, you've probably got fans that love section three of the record versus section one, right? So how does that work for a live set when you're picking that out?

Brue: Frankly, it's getting harder and harder because we're coming up on our sixth album. So we have so many songs to pick from. We have 80 minutes that we're playing and we have to incorporate a lot of the older songs that are some of our bigger songs that people really enjoy, but also a mixture of some of the new songs and trying to make the best format.

Something cool that we did on this run right before this tour was we asked our fans to vote on all of the songs that we have in our catalog, and then we kind of got to see what the top 20 were. It was cool because they really had had a say, and a lot of the songs that we picked originally ended up overlapping with the songs that they were requesting too.

OMC: What are your favorites to play in this current setlist?

Butler: “Good Vibrations” is one that we always cite every time we play. That was fun to play and it's been really a great addition to the show. The other one, I would say for me, “Aztec Death Whistle” off the new album, specifically focusing on the new album. There's just moments that  we haven't really messed around with, on the spectrum with some sounds in terms of in the guitar world or in that in the stringed instrument world.

Brue: I actually agree that “Good Vibrations” is one of my favorite ones to play. “Aztec” is really fun to play. We've been playing “Can You Feel the Sun” stripped down on this tour at the first two shows. I feel like that song has been really cool and has been resonating a lot with the people who've had it thus far. So that would be my top three.

OMC: What does the rest of the year look like for you guys? How far are you guys looking ahead?

Butler: We're looking so far ahead. Always. It's fun because we're songwriters, and we love songwriting. So we always surprise ourselves with how much songwriting happens on our break times. But we just got off of tour. I think it was the end of October, so not that long ago, and we kind of went on break and we came back with a really large and healthy pipeline of songs. So we're well on our way to our sixth album at this point. 

So we're going to be getting into the studio and starting to finish off some songs and put an album together later on this spring.. We’ve got a lot of other things in the works, but nothing officially that we can talk about yet. Live shows will be happening. I mean, we're going to continue to look at that and there'll be some global things happening, but just still a little TBD on the exact when and where of all that. But it’s exciting.

You can catch Missio on Saturday night at Vivarium. Tickets are on sale now via the Pabst Theater Group website.