Tell me how your new Archive box came together. As our silver anniversary was approaching, we realized there was an opportunity to commemorate it with something special. We’ve always had a lot of odds and ends—B-sides and demos and alternate versions—in the vault, so we got it together and put out a box set. Chad [Sexton], our drummer, is really the band archivist—he’s got a big closet full of tapes and hard drives, down to reel to reel format where it’s hard to even find something to play them on. We got it all together and remastered everything to make it as even as possible. I hadn’t heard a lot of those songs in a long time, so it was really cool to spark those recessed neurons. I think it’s gonna be a real trip for our fans.

Was the rest of the band involved in picking the songs? We really let Chad lead, because he had always taken the time to keep track of everything. One interesting story about him is that there was a wildfire out by his house, and this wall of flame was coming toward his property. The first thing he did was load up his truck with boxes of hard drives and tapes and everything. The fire was extinguished before it got to him, but that was the first thing he saved, because it’s irreplaceable.

Is there a certain track you’re really excited for people to hear? There’s a song called “Strong All Along” off our Soundsystem album. An early version of that was called “Pass the Grass,” and it had different lyrics and a really far-out creativity. It was a demo that I made when I guess I was in a really weird mood, and a lot of it got changed for the final version. But for people that have lived with this song for about 17 years now as “Strong All Along,” I think the skeleton of it with different words will be a trip.

There’s a lot of examples like that, where songs really transform from the demo version to the album version. It’s like looking at a family photo album and thinking, “Wow, did I ever look like that?” My favorite band of all time was The Clash, and I loved finding their early demos and bootlegs and stuff like that, but it was a lot work. We’re making it easy on our fans, so they don’t have to dig.

As you celebrate 25 years as a band, what do you remember most about the early years as a band? There was one year where we put all our meager possessions into a storage unit and just lived on the road. We were doing hundreds of shows a year and also still somehow managed to make the [self-titled] “Blue Album” that year. Plus a lot of wild parties to celebrate the momentum we were gaining.

Now that you’re independent again, do you feel more or less pressure? I think the turning point came back in 2000, where we realized we’re a touring band, more like jam bands, because playing live music is something that you can’t fake and it’s something that we enjoy so much. We work the albums around touring. At that point it took the pressure off making albums because we realized we’ve got such a bedrock of a fanbase, it’s not make or break that we have a hit or anything like that.

Anything special planned for your July 3 and 4 shows at Mandalay Bay Beach? It’s the 20-year anniversary of our “Blue Album,” so we’re playing that album in its entirety. And we have a bunch of other surprises planned over two nights. That’s just a fun place to see a show. The first time we played there, it took us a few minutes to get used to such an unusual setting, to have a stage surrounded by water and people on the beach and in and out of the water, but the show we had there last year was fantastic, so we thought, let’s make this a tradition but also make it a special night with the 20th anniversary of our self-titled album.

Are those the only shows where you’re playing the full “Blue Album” on this tour? Yeah. I think we did that back in 2003, but this will be the first time since then. It’s a way to give people something special. When we were on the [Carribean] cruise, we did Soundsystem in its entirety, which was a very Jamaican-influenced record, so that was appropriate. This is more of a party album so it might as well be in Vegas.

I was 10 when that record came out, and I remember the picture of you guys with the alien eyes, the ridiculous conspiracies about your band name and hearing the combination of rap and rock for the first time. What was it like developing that sound back then? I guess we came up in the time of grunge, where everything on the radio was just rock. I mean, it was cool rock, but we needed more twists and turns. Growing up in Omaha, we were geographically in the middle of a lot of things between reggae from Jamaica and punk rock from LA and New York, hearing Bad Brains from D.C. and the Chili Peppers from LA. And of course, alternative was still alternative at the time.

We were just all over the place, and we insisted that we were going to break the mold of being in one certain lane. We had this eclectic, anything-goes attitude, and we needed our rock to be funkier than what was on the radio at the time. So we decided we were gonna do what we do, just playing shows and waiting for the culture to come around to us. And that’s what happened, through “All Mixed Up” and “Down” and songs on the “Blue Album” that blew up to a wider audience. It wasn’t that some radio station or MTV really championed us; it was because there was such a groundswell of excitement from the shows we were doing that they demanded it. It was cool to kick the door open and not be invited in.

311 July 3 & 4, 9 p.m., $55/show, $95/both. Mandalay Bay Beach, 702-632-7777.