Deap Vally’s Julie Edwards has been lucky enough to have a front seat for Desert Daze, the cool-crowd California music festival that’s stayed fiercely grassroots in an era when mega-corporations quickly gobble up everything good.

Reached at home in Los Angeles, the drummer acknowledges that the 2016 edition of the fest—which featured Primus, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, and the Brian Jonestown Massacre—might have been the most chill ever, at least from her perspective. It’s not often that you help start something with countless moving parts, and then get to stand back and watch while others do all the sweating. When Edwards picks up the phone, she suggests with a laugh that having a new baby helped earn her a pass.

“Desert Daze is a music festival that my husband and I and some of our friends started,” Edwards says, her infant daughter happily gurgling away in the background. “We wanted to put on the kind of festival that we wanted to go to. And that was ironic—you start a festival because you want to make the perfect one with the exact lineup that’s killer for your tastes. But then the festival rolls around and you don’t get to see it because you’re busy running around and putting out fires. I have to give my husband and our friends credit though, because since I’ve had the baby I’m not in the trenches. Last year, all I had to do was go and play.”

And that’s mostly what she’ll be doing again on the Desert Daze Caravan tour, which is currently winding its way up the coast. Think of the travelling package as a primer for this fall’s edition of the psych-hazed alternative festival. In addition to Deap Vally, the bill includes Desert Daze 2016 alumni Temples, Jjuujjuu, Froth, and Night Beats, backed by projected visuals designed to make you wish you’d been around for the acid-fried ’60s.

Edwards says Desert Daze—which takes place outside of the traditional festival season—has grown over a half-decade run to where it now attracts 6,000 people. Along the way, it’s created a close-knit collective of like-minded bands, which has its benefits when you’re trying to balance motherhood with a music career.

“It’s really nice because my husband’s band, Jjuujjuu, is also on this tour,” Edwards says. “So this is one of the times where we are all together as a family, whereas normally I take our daughter out and he’s not with her, which has its pluses and minuses.”

Along with Deap Vally singer-guitarist Lindsey Troy, Edwards has gotten used to balancing demands and managing expectations, and not just on the Desert Daze front. The band exploded out of Los Angeles with a major-label debut—the scuzz-blues scorcher Sistrionix—in 2013, earning comparisons to the likes of the White Stripes and Black Keys.

Last fall’s Femejism found Deap Vally moving to the indie label Nevado Music, enabling Troy and Edwards to go in directions only hinted at on Sistrionix.

That the duo is ready to take on all comers is clear off the top, with the slow-burning drone “Royal Jelly” featuring lines like “If you wanna be queen bee/If you wanna be Miss Thing then you better start hustling.” And Femejism is the sound of Deap Vally doing just that, with “Gonnawanna” channelling the raw squalor of Pretty on the Inside–edition Hole, “Post Funk” diving into tribal new wave, and “Heart Is an Animal” rocking grungier than Seattle circa 1989.

“Being on a major label had many, many benefits, but from an emotional standpoint it was very dark,” Edwards relates. “Once we were free, we knew that we could record a song and not have someone’s seemingly arbitrary feedback running through our heads all the time. We’d play them [major-label executives] songs and they’d want five or six hit singles and all these things done to them. They thought they could control whether or not something became a hit, and I don’t think you can—it seems more like a complete crapshoot to me.”

The duo still sounds like it’s done hard, liquored-up time at the Crossroads. But with Yeah Yeah Yeahs guitarist Nick Zinner in the production chair, the women of Deap Vally are equally eager to unleash their inner art stars. Consider the mission statement that is “Smile More”, where, over reverb-dipped guitars, a fabulously bored-sounding Troy takes lethal aim at practically everything that’s pissing her off, with lines like “I am not ashamed of my sex life although I wish it was better” and “I am happily unhappy.”

“We loved our first record, Sistrionix, and I’d say that 99.9 percent, it’s the record that we wanted to make,” Edwards notes. “But even what little input that we got from the label sort of destroyed the process of creativity. We felt that we needed total freedom to explore the things we wanted to and to carve out our own tastes. Femejism was this amazing opportunity to do that.”

Consider that a sign that for Edwards, everything—more than ever in these corporate times—is better at the grassroots level, whether it’s making records or helping run a festival that many have called a must-visit alternative to Coachella.

“Desert Daze started as an 11-day-long thing in a dive bar in Desert Hot Springs,” she says. “Then we moved it to Mecca, California, to Sunset Ranch, which is really a wild location—very dusty and sandy and Mad Max. Those were great years. Now we’re at the Joshua Tree Retreat Center, also known as the Institute of Mentalphysics, which was built on ancient aquifers. Joshua Tree is a very spiritual place—just being there you feel good. Location is so important to us—obviously, we wanted the festival to feel different from one that was on a giant field or parking lot. We want it to have a sense of adventure with endless pathways to discover.”

Deap Vally plays the Rickshaw Theatre on Sunday (February 26) as part of the Desert Daze Caravan tour.