“We’ve always been a polarizing band,” AFI frontman Davey Havok admits, as he and his bandmates Jade Puget (guitar), Adam Carson (drums), and Hunter Burgan (bass) sit down with Yahoo Music to reflect on AFI’s wide-ranging discography. But Havok recalls a time, right around the release of 2000’s Art of Drowning, when there was a “shift in the male-female ratio” of AFI’s audience. And AFI — who formed in 1991 amid NoCal’s testosterone-soaked punk scene, and issued their early albums on Offspring singer Dexter Holland’s Nitro Records — were absolutely thrilled about that.

“It’s cool when it’s weighted towards the female, because from what I’ve known growing up, ladies always have the best taste in music,” Havok asserts with a grin.

“We used to only play to men,” the famously androgynous Havok continues. “Up until [1997’s] Shut Your Mouth…, we were playing to, like, seven people a night. Two people a night. No people a night. Twenty people a night. Fifty people a night. … Up until Jade and Hunter joined the band, really, the crowds were mostly male. And then more women started showing up, and I would say it remained half and half at least from there out, if not weighted towards the female.”

“If you’re only playing to guys, you’ll only be this size,” adds Puget. “You have to appeal to everyone.”

Of course, as Havok notes, AFI, whose sound has riskily and wildly fluctuated from hardcore punk to synthy darkwave to stomping glam-pop, haven’t always appealed to everyone. And they’re totally OK with that too.

“We’ve been polarizing for different reasons. For one thing, my voice is very polarizing. It sits in this place that either appeals to people or really puts people off. I can understand that,” says Havok, who reveals that he used to hold a rag while recording his vocals to prevent his hands from bleeding. (“I clench when I’m screaming, and for a long period of my life, I had very long nails that were far more fabulous than they are now. Having long nails and clenching that hard will dig holes in your hands.”)

“In addition to that, our sound [in the early days], and what we were inspired by, wasn’t really en vogue in the community we were playing in,” Havok continues. “There were all sorts of different types of alternative music, and punk and hardcore, but not really what we were doing was happening. So we were asking a lot of people to come and enjoy this, because it really wasn’t what was going on.”

Havok recalls with a chuckle when AFI made their first music video, for “He Who Laughs Last” off 1996’s Very Proud of Ya. “We did a free show at Berkeley Square, and it was known that it was a video shoot, and to flier it we offered free pizza and soda. … There were probably 250 people who showed up, with 150 hardcore kids in the front, as can be seen in the video. And in the back were a hundred crust-punks eating free pizza, who hated our band and loved free food.” (“I was one of those,” jokes Puget, who was in a rival Bay Area band at the time.) Havok also remembers when a batch of Very Proud of Ya promo posters was shipped to Berkeley’s fabled punk club Gilman St. “Because we had signed to a larger indie [Nitro] … someone had made a big dollar sign out of it, up on the wall of our posters, because we had ‘sold out.’”

But with their ambition and vision, AFI were always destined for big things beyond Berkeley, even if they started off cohabitating in a squalid squat, with Puget, who officially joined the band in 1998, living in a “clayvit” in Havok’s bedroom. “We called it a clayvit because it was a combination of a closet and a cave,” Puget explains. “I had just graduated college, and I didn’t know what I was going to do. I had no real plans … I didn’t have any money because I was obviously broke. And [the band was] like, ‘If you’re going to be a band member full time, like, you can’t have a job,’ so they got Dexter Holland to send me a thousand dollars. So I got this $1,000 check, and I’d never gotten a check that had like four digits on it. I was like, ‘Oh, my God! This is the rock star life? Thousand-dollar checks just arriving in the mail?’ So I felt like, ‘This is it, a life of leisure! I got this thousand dollars in the bank, I’ll just live indefinitely on that.’ And we really could, because our rent was like $150 a month or something.”

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