LOS ANGELES, CA.- If there’s one thing the fractious Black Crowes co-founders agree on, it’s that they’ve never fit in.

When the Atlanta-based band, led by brothers Chris and Rich Robinson, broke through with “Shake Your Money Maker,” the neo-classic-rock 1990 debut, “we weren’t cool,” Chris Robinson, 57, the band’s singer, lyricist and mouthpiece, said recently. “We weren’t indie, and we weren’t from Seattle.”

Rich Robinson, 54, a decidedly stolid type who composes their music and plays guitar, recalled, “Hair metal was big.”

“Everyone looked like Guns N’ Roses,” Chris Robinson added. “To me, walking out in bell bottoms and my Mick-Jagger-in-‘Performance’ vibe, that was punk. No one looked like us.”

“We’ve always been unto ourselves,” his brother said.

Thirty-plus years after their five-times platinum debut spawned the soulful rock-radio stalwarts “She Talks to Angels,” “Jealous Again” and their boogie-rock cover of Otis Redding’s “Hard to Handle,” the Robinsons have defied expectations — their own as well as their fans’ — by coming together again. Their first album of new songs in 15 years, the back-to-basics “Happiness Bastards,” is due March 15 on the band’s own Silver Arrow label.

For brothers who fought like Battlebots when they were on top of the rock world, and who didn’t even speak to each other during a large swath of the 2010s, this reconciliation has helped heal many of the wounds, personal and professional, left by decades of personality crises, ego clashes, substance abuse, lineup changes, passive-aggressive solo projects (like the caustically named Chris Robinson Brotherhood) and, above it all, Old Testament-level sibling rivalry.

“We’re complete opposites,” Chris Robinson said.

“But now we have an understanding,” Rich Robinson noted, “whereas everything was previously built on misunderstanding.”

On a rain-soaked February afternoon in Los Angeles, the Robinsons gathered for lunch at the Chateau Marmont hotel, a forever haunt for rock stars and Hollywood celebrities. Rich carried the air of a gentleman farmer, in a buttoned-up waxed jacket. Chris, a self-described dandy with silver necklaces draped atop a Johnny Thunders T-shirt, chipped black nail polish and tattoos blanketing his hands and arms, evoked the ghosts of an era when rock decadence was glorified. Seated next to him on a sofa, hand clasped in his, was his wife, Camille, who designed the album artwork for “Happiness Bastards” with Chris and helped bring the brothers back together.

“One of the most inspiring things about our love was her being able to say, ‘Let’s talk about you and your brother,’ ” Chris said. “‘Let’s talk about what was and what could be.’”

The Robinsons were born and raised in the Atlanta suburbs, in a house filled with music from their parents’ record collection: bluesman Jimmy Reed, bluegrass titans Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs. Their father, Stan Robinson, was a folk singer who once toured with Phil Ochs.

“He was also a performer,” Chris said. “He acted and danced, and when we were kids, he would still get parts in commercials.”

“He was gregarious and outgoing,” Rich noted.

“I’m more like Dad,” Chris said.

Chris “was the expeditionary,” Rich said. “He would go out and bring home records. And I would obsess over the instrumentation and pick it apart.” Chris was a voracious and ecumenical music hound, falling not only for the Anglo-American grit and glam of the Rolling Stones and Humble Pie that is clearly stamped on their look and sound, but punk, indie-rock from nearby Athens and crucially, the genre-straddling Black music that Atlanta birthed and hosted, from the local act Mother’s Finest to swaggering funk-rock groups like Slave, Cameo and the Time that sparked a flame in Chris when they came through town.

“Like a lot of suburban middle-class kids,” he said, “music really saved us.”

WITH CHRIS AS THE STRUTTING, motor-mouthed focal point, and Rich’s open-tuned riffs providing the musical backbone, the Crowes quickly gained a reputation as a bracing live act and rock traditionalists who rejected the commercialism and corporate tie-ins that had become synonymous with A-list pop acts. (They were kicked off an arena tour with ZZ Top when Chris took the stage and trash-talked the shows’ sponsor, Miller Lite.)

“We’re anti-authority,” Chris said. “That’s the whole point of being in a band. We’ve always felt a romantic connection to things that we felt were authentic.”

Unsurprisingly for a band that revered Jack Kerouac and the Rolling Stones in equal measure, the Crowes fell prey to most of the cliches that came with rock stardom. Following the critical and commercial success of its second album, “The Southern Harmony and Musical Companion,” the band split into two factions: the hard drug users, led by Chris, and the nonusers, led by Rich. The band’s debauchery, however, was limited to substances.

“I was far more interested in drugs than sex,” Chris said. “When I heard stories of metal bands having group sex on the road? Personally, I just found it unhygienic. Besides the drugs, we were pretty boring.”

For the band’s third album, “Amorica” from 1994, Chris insisted on using an old NSFW photograph from Hustler magazine for the cover, rendering it a nonstarter for big-box stores that dominated the retail landscape prestreaming.

“We could be our own worst enemy,” Rich acknowledged. Meanwhile, grunge and its polished offshoots were rendering their Led Zeppelin-at-Muscle Shoals vibe even more of an anachronism. Soon, when the brothers crisscrossed the country on tour, they rode in separate buses.

“I’m sure a band like Pearl Jam had some of the same problems we did,” Chris said. “But ours were just spilling out into the world.” Today, he says he doesn’t think he ever properly dealt with feelings of depression that alienated him from Rich and the band. “But who had time to be depressed in the ’90s?”

The band’s revolving-door personnel changes eventually reached double digits (by some counts it had 25 members all told), as painstakingly chronicled in a 2019 tell-all book written by the band’s former drummer, Steve Gorman, which blames their demise simultaneously on the brothers’ tortured relationship and their lack of regard for anyone but each other.

“Look,” Rich said matter-of-factly, “the core has always been me and Chris, regardless of what some people say. There’s a lot of things that happen. Substances happen. Attitudes happen. Life happens. Some people can handle it, some people can’t.”

While Chris was becoming a tabloid staple in the early aughts via his marriage to actor and Hollywood royal Kate Hudson, the band was losing its footing. Following a handful of albums that left no discernible trace, the Black Crowes disbanded in 2015, after Chris demanded a larger share of the band’s income.

“I was like, if you guys want me to keep doing this, I want to be paid more than everyone,” he said. “I knew that would put the brakes on things. I wanted to blow it up.”

It wasn’t until 2019, and the pending 30th anniversary of “Shake Your Money Maker,” that the brothers reconnected, at first through intermediaries.

“I was writing songs and thought, ‘Man, I would love to hear Chris sing on this,’ ” Rich said. “And I mentioned it to a friend, and he said, ‘Chris said something similar to me two days ago.’ It wasn’t a big deal. We were just on the same wavelength.”

A reunion tour planned for 2020 had to be pushed back a year because of COVID-19, but during the lockdown, Rich started sending his brother new songs, eventually leading to the band’s heading to Nashville, Tennessee, in the summer of 2023 and recording “Happiness Bastards” with country and rock producer Jay Joyce.

Joyce is probably best known for his work with buzzy Nashville star Lainey Wilson, who shares vocals with Chris on the new album’s “Wilted Rose,” a forlorn country blues song. Wilson grew up a Crowes fan.

“One of my favorite reviews of my band was when we were called ‘a garage-band evocation of the Black Crowes,’” she said in an email. “I knew I had to be a part of this project.”

As one of six brothers, Joyce said he “was expecting drama and fights, but there was very little of it.” They recorded the 10-song album in a few weeks, with the band playing live. “It was old-school: everyone in the same room, no click tracks, no BS,” Joyce said. “It’s rare to do a record like that these days. They’re a dying breed.”

Chris likens the compact energy of “Happiness Bastards” to “Shake Your Money Maker”: “It’s a rock ’n’ roll record. Focused. Riff-oriented. Before we get older and can’t do that anymore.”

The bedrock pleasures of their roadhouse Southern rock mask some surprisingly dark, venomous lyrics directed toward ex-lovers or bandmates: “Stab a knife in my back/ and then you want a please,” Chris sings accusingly on the opener, “Bedside Manner.” The album ends on a wistful note, though, with “Kindred Friend,” an olive branch from Chris to Rich (“Let’s stop pretending/ and write our own ending”). “But in a weird way,” Chris said, “it’s also to our fans, about reconnecting with them.”

The band has longtime fans waiting for them: “I love the Black Crowes and have since hearing ‘Hard to Handle,’” said Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler, who booked the band to headline his annual Grammy-night charity event this year. “Chris and Rich share our band’s love of English blues, R&B and flat-out, kick-ass rock ’n’ roll. They’re the real deal.”

AFTER THE CHATEAU MARMONT lunch, the band headed to an evening event in Burbank to promote “Happiness Bastards” with a miniconcert for a few hundred contest winners and invited guests that would be broadcast live on iHeartRadio.

Rich quietly noodled on his guitar in one dressing room, with his son Quinn, 23, an aspiring musician, keeping him company. (Rich has seven children, ranging in age from 3 to 27.) Down the hall, Chris held court in his, riffing on his favorite British comedies (Season 1 of “Absolutely Fabulous”; a surrealist puppet show called “Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared”) and exuberantly DJing for the rest of the band, jumping from Sweet’s “Ballroom Blitz” to Prince’s “Party Up.” The contrast between rooms is stark, but it’s no longer a source of discord.

“In the past, I’d be like, why isn’t Rich in here with me?” Chris said. “And he’d be like, why is Chris so loud and chaotic? Now, we love each other for who we are.”

“Who we are” includes being men in their mid-50s. As a concession to age, Chris, still a “daily cannabis user,” no longer smokes while on tour.

“We don’t live like we used to,” he said. “We get on the bus, listen to music, play some gin rummy and go to sleep. No more wilding out until 6 in the morning.” He scoffed, good-naturedly, at TikTok: “That’s for children. I write with a pen and a notebook.” He boasted about his kids: his son, Ryder, from his marriage to Hudson, now attending New York University; and his daughter, Cheyenne, 14, who lives in Woodstock, New York, with ex-wife No. 3.

“Both of my children are lovely, lovely people.”

Onstage, backed by a recently assembled band that includes on-again, off-again bassist Sven Pipien and two backup singers, the Crowes muscled through their hits, sprinkling in two well-received songs from “Happiness Bastards” and some deeper catalog cuts. Between numbers, a jovial radio jock lobbed some softball questions at them, and the brothers slipped into their parts, with Chris doing most of the talking and Rich chiming in only when pressed.

For much of 2024, the Black Crowes will be back on the road (with separate dressing rooms), performing at theaters and festivals across the United States and Europe. Chris can’t imagine ever doing anything else.

“I’m unemployable,” he said. “I’m nuts. But with the band, I get to do things in my own freakish way.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.