When the members of The Dip started recording in their Seattle studio nearly a decade ago, they had no idea that they would go on to earn rave reviews, play large festivals and score the No. 1 spot on Billboard magazine’s R&B Album chart.

Along the way, The Dip also developed an increasingly eclectic and less predictable sound, as evidenced by its 2024 Dualtone album, “Love Direction.”

“I think that this record was definitely an effort to sort of guide it away from the stuff that we originally started out doing,” bandleader Tom Eddy said in a recent interview, referencing their earlier, more R&B-derived sound.

“Having played that music for a number of years, we just wanted our music to be a vehicle for more interesting improvisation live, with more chords and more changes. It’s not like we’re trying to alienate people to a degree where they’re like, ‘What the hell is this (expletive)?’ But we’re definitely trying to move in different directions and explore different sounds and colors. And there are so many great improvisers in our group. So I think that’s part of where that’s coming from.”

The Dip will open Friday for The Red Clay Strays as the Get Right Tour stops at Ford Amphitheater in Colorado Springs.

The Dip’s fourth album, “Love Direction,” also shows Eddy’s development as a songwriter, from the poignantly elegiac “Humble Hands” to the raucous “Head on a Swivel,” which is all about jealousy and bar fights.

Formed by the merger of two sets of friends — one including Eddy, bassist Mark Hunter and drummer Jarret Katz and the other trumpeter Brennan Carter, tenor saxophonist Levi Gillis and baritone sax player Evan Smith — The Dip is taking advantage of the wide musical vocabulary the band members bring to the table.

“Having seven people in the group is kind of a double-edged sword, because there’s a pretty big swath of musical interests,” Eddy said of the lineup, which now also includes a keyboardist. “We drew most of our musical vocabulary from R&B and jazz, but everyone’s got their own thing. Our baritone sax player’s very deep into some heavy classical stuff. I tend to gravitate toward Latin music and also Caribbean music like calypso and mento from the islands. I just love the joy of it, the percussion and those rhythms. That element hasn’t really made it into much of The Dip’s music, but maybe in the future. Who knows?”