Craig Finn heaves his whole body toward the crowd just as the chorus to “Southtown Girls” hits, nearly toppling into the front row. Five spent High Lifes stand on the drum riser next to a fresh water-cooler cup full of whiskey. Finn has that drunk gaze where things linger a second too long, and in that second anything can happen. He smiles like a fourth grader being told to “smile bigger.” He keeps throwing his body toward the fans who have come out from Greenpoint, Minneapolis, Chicago, and London to see the Hold Steady play their 10th anniversary show. This feels big. Hold Steady shows always feel big.

Up front: This whole "10th anniversary" business involves a bit of handy mythmaking. The Hold Steady played their first official gig January 22, 2003—11 years ago—in the same Williamsburg space where they played last Thursday. But even that’s not totally true. Their real first gig had them playing as a house band for an Upright Citizens Brigade comedy show.

“They wanted to have like a Paul Shaffer-type band to play a KISS song, a Cheap Trick song, a David Bowie song,” says guitarist Tad Kubler. "Craig was like, ‘Dude this is your fucking wheelhouse, you know all these already.’” Yes: The Hold Steady played their first show together as an unnamed bar band at Arlene’s Grocery in the Lower East Side.

“I’m sure I was 30 pounds heavier and fucking wasted,” half-remembers Kubler, a little bemused.

Finn and Kubler’s relationship stretches back to Minneapolis in the 1990s, back to when they were in the storied local band Lifter Puller, known throughout the hermetic Twin Cities scene as one of the best and most debauched underground acts around. After Lifter Puller dissolved, Finn relocated to New York in September of 2000 at the tail end of dot-com boom front-end of NYC indie rock boom courtesy of bands like the Strokes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and Interpol. While everyone else tried on Television and Joy Division, the Hold Steady dug up Thin Lizzy.

“We’d go in the practice space,” recalls Finn, sipping a clear drink in a tall glass in the rear of Lake Street, a bar co-owned by the band’s current drummer Bobby Drake. “And there’d be all that hi-hat—chk-a chk-a chk-a—and we were doing this riff rock thing, and were older, and we weren’t dressing the same as those bands.”

Their 2004 debut album Almost Killed Me came on like it was always two steps ahead of you. It was self-effacing but also so cocksure, with guitar solos drowning in cheap beer. It had the all the self-reflexive signifiers of indie rock and the bar-band exuberance of classic rock. When he started the Hold Steady, Finn knew he wanted to reach across the aisles.

“I was coming out of indie rock,” says Finn. “And I was a little bit disillusioned by things like obscure 7”s—it seemed a little bit like bullshit. I’d been into really indie stuff like Sebadoh, and it was like, 'You know, this is ultimately kind of unfulfilling compared to seeing Springsteen and feeling a part of something awesome.’”

“The first record was Craig and I in his kitchen just doing our thing,” says Kubler. “With [2005 follow-up Separation Sunday] I had just became a dad, and that was an emotionally heavy time for me. I remember writing most of those songs sitting on the couch quietly with an unplugged electric guitar.”

Those first two records thrived on the details of wayward Catholic girls and drug dealers in sweatpants. Finn constructed a world where idyllic archetypes of self-destructive youth live for killer parties. Ybor City and Penetration Park were put on the map, even if we didn’t quite know where they were. And there was this idea of a scene—down-trodden kids looking for something concrete in the fast-spinning hyperreality of millennial culture. It was something to be a part of, and something that never really existed.

Finn became the unreliable narrator you desperately wanted to believe in, no matter the consequence. On “Chicago Seemed Tired Last Night”, he sings: “And I’m not saying we could save you/ But we could put you in a place where you could save yourself.” The bender and rehab, the party and the hangover. Everybody under one roof.

“When I got to 30," Finn says, "I realized that it's more awesome being inclusive rather than exclusive.”

The guys and girls in the third row are singing every word; there’s some guys and girls in the first row who know every word so well that they only sing when they have to. There’s bro side-hugs. There’s shared kisses. There’s Wayne and Garth rock-out moments. Lines including “high as hell and shivering and smashed!” and “get hammered!” are shouted loud. Just after midnight, Kubler sips a clear drink from a plastic solo cup isolated stage left as his daughter watches a few feet behind him on the steps to the backstage.

Tad Kubler lowers his voice to me as we sit inside his two-story loft in Greenpoint. “There are so many layers to the relationships inside the band that no one’s ever talked about, and we don’t talk about it because we’re Midwestern men. We suffer and celebrate in silence.”

In October 2006, the Hold Steady put out Boys and Girls in America. With the mustachioed keyboardist Franz Nicolay and drummer Bobby Drake now full-time members, they skipped tiers from being an indie rock band who loved getting the Led out on the weekends to a fully lit-up E-Street vox rockuli. They still housed a case of beer on stage. They still plowed two bottles of Jameson a night. Close at Boys and Girls' heels came Stay Positive in 2008. The parties were still killer, adderall was now in the mix, and stakes were raised.

“The way we were traveling and writing, Boys and Girls and Stay Positive were made in the same blur,” says Finn. On tour, nights collided with the morning. It's something that’s scratched into the Hold Steady's DNA: We are a party band. The booze started before the shows and ended after the sunrise. Up until this point, Kubler had never been on stage sober.

“When Tad went to the hospital," says Finn, "it was a wake-up call for everyone.”

In the fall of 2008, Kubler was diagnosed with pancreatitis as a result of his years of drinking. The band canceled a European tour. A year later, in November 2009, the guitarist was hospitalized again for pancreatitis. Shortly thereafter, keyboardist Franz Nicolay left the band.

“Pancreatitis is incredibly painful, and they had me on morphine and all kinds of other shit, and if you let that get away from you, it gets away from you quickly," says Kubler, trailing off. “I wasn’t sober but I wasn’t drinking either—you can fill in the blanks there."

Both Kubler and Finn say that the lead up to writing 2010's Heaven Is Whenever felt a little disconnected, the process a little rushed. Finn hedges and says simply the band needed a little break; Kubler says it was due to his own seclusion following his diagnosis, now that he was unable to drink like the rest of the band.

Kubler cleaned up in early 2010, just as the band was mixing Heaven Is Whenever, which debuted at No. 26 on the Billboard charts, a new high. But after spending years living up to his own ultimate drinking band code onstage, Kubler was now sober under the lights.

“It’s fucking terrifying,” says the guitarist. “And it can be really hard when the rest of the band is six drinks into the evening and you’re not. It’s like, ‘How do I feel like a part of what’s happening here when I’m not involved in that part of it?’ It took me a year to really get involved—I’m sure I was a miserable prick for a lot of that time too, because I didn’t know what I was doing.”

"If somebody's drinking that much and they have to stop, there’s an adjustment period of their personality," says Finn. "Tad came into the band as someone who was pretty rock'n'roll in his behavior and he had to go from being the most likely to be out until five in the morning to being the least likely. Our shows became less drunken, less crazy. It changed the culture of the band.”

Unbeknownst to Kubler at the time, Finn went to Austin to record a solo album after the Heaven Is Whenever tour wrapped. What was supposed to be a three month break for the band turned into a year-and-a-half hiatus. Kubler started writing songs on his own and with the rest of the Hold Steady, which now included guitarist Steve Selvidge. The music for their forthcoming sixth album, Teeth Dreams, was written completely separate from Finn.

“When the band first started, Craig and I spent a lot of time together, we just hung out and were bros," remembers Kubler. "It's weird because when I was in Lifter Puller, Craig and I didn’t have that relationship, because I had one lifestyle and he had another. Now, that’s kind of happening again.” As he says this, we sit on the couch in his Greenpoint loft, located just a couple blocks from Finn’s place. “I never see the guy.”

Selvidge stands next to longtime bassist Galen Polivka on stage right. The beer-soaked keyboards are missed in some songs, but the band powers through. With two guitars, their older material doesn’t sound bloated, just fat. The Hold Steady are a huge guitar band now. Near the end of the set, Kubler plays a bloozy eight-bar solo then trades it off to Selvidge, who does his own eight bars, a little more complex, a little more showy. Kubler’s lips read “damn” as he shakes his head and smiles at just how good the solo is. It is a really good solo.

For the brief tour leading up to their anniversary show, the band have been winding their way up from Tennessee, where they recorded Teeth Dreams. They’ve been doing radio shows at terrible hours of the morning. Kubler says he and Finn normally don’t do interviews together because he rambles on so much and Finn “doesn’t want to let anything out.”

“It’s hard for Craig to recognize other people,” says Kubler. “We were doing a radio show, and he says, ‘I’m really glad we got Steve in the band,’ and it’s like, 'Are you fucking kidding me?' I love Steve, but I still wrote the songs! It’s so hard for him to recognize anything like that. He loves to withhold. There’s humility with Craig, but I always wonder how genuine it is."

He’s sure to point out that there’s no animosity between the two, though. “We’re not like the Davies brothers,” says Kubler. “I fucking love the guy. It’s just… he’s a very, very complex person."

Finn dedicates the Stay Positive track “Magazines” to his girlfriend Angie in the balcony and points to her when he says, “I hope you still let me kiss you.” They play a new song called “I Hope This Whole Thing Didn’t Frighten You” and it’s the first glimmer of the band’s new identity. The song is rowdier and raw live, a little sad, a little earnest. It’s so dense that Finn sounds like another texture between the rest of the sounds.

“Truth is a hard thing,” says Finn, still sipping on his drink across from me at Lake Street.

About a year ago, Finn’s mother passed away, which triggered physical manifestations of anxiety. He says he got a little help for it, never took any drugs, and that it has more or less gone away. The whole matter gave him “more empathy for anxiety as a crippling situation.” He also read Infinite Jest twice while writing Teeth Dreams, which would make any person a little anxious. David Foster Wallace’s themes about an “American sadness,” addiction, and anxiety color Finn’s words on the album.

“I had this theory about how we manipulate the truth through things like the internet," says Finn. "There’s this projection of the self, and then there’s the real self—and the space between causes a lot of anxiety.”

Back in Kubler’s loft, the guitarist plays a video of a tracking session for the new song “Spinners”. The playback shows him and Selvidge with Grammy-winning producer Nick Raskulinecz, who produced Foo Fighters' One by One along with the last two Deftones albums. The band loved working with Raskulinecz, though both Finn and Kubler admit that they’re pretty sure he had no idea who they were before he started working with them. But Raskulinecz’s ear was just what the band needed to try to get them out of their own heads.

“After six albums you don’t want to become a caricature of yourself,” says Finn. “If you make it really easy for people to do a Craig Finn impersonation, there isn’t much of a place for people to put their lives in that.” There isn't a consensus on what Teeth Dreams “means” for both Finn and Kubler. Both seem happy to just have made it this far, to be on the other side of uncertainty.

“I fucking love everyone here on stage,” says Finn while the band vamps on “Killer Parties”. The singer is beyond maudlin as he hangs on the microphone, spilling whiskey out of his cup while he thanks the fans. Heads are sparkling with homemade confetti. It’s time for the tradition, how Finn ends every show. “Some of you guys have heard me say this before, but man, I always say it, because it’s true.” He draws this preamble out, swaying, delaying. Finally, he throws his hands into the air: “There is so much joy in what we do up here.” He says it with ease.