Scenario: you’re pursuing your lifelong dream of playing guitar in a rock band and working hard to complete your first full-length album.

Merely a day after securing a contract with your first record label, your apartment door slams shut on your finger and slices it off. Fate has reared its ugly head, and the Average Joe would have given up on a career in music right then and there.

These are the tribulations of Chase Duncan, a former resident of Athens.

Now based in Chicago, Duncan is the singer and guitarist of indie-rock trio The Interiors, which is set to take the stage at Farm 255 Sunday night.

“It was a horrible thing to go through,” he said. “But on the other side of it, I’ve learned so much about myself and became a better person and guitar player as a result.”

Duncan suffered his accident in summer 2007, in the midst of recording The Interiors’ debut. The album finally was released this summer.

“I ended up finding a great surgeon who was empathetic with me needing my fingertip to play guitar,” Duncan said. “He ended up reconstructing a [prosthetic] fingertip and it wound up healing better than anybody expected.”

This fortunate turn of events allowed Duncan to continue pursuing a career in music after six months of relative inactivity.

“The process was a painful one,” he said. “There was a lot of personal strife during that particular period of the band’s life. But the album was a great detractor from ‘hard living.’”

Self-described as an indie-rock group, The Interiors draws from a considerable arsenal of influences. Duncan specifically cited R.E.M., Lil Wayne, Talking Heads and African pop music as his inspiration – disparate styles that don’t generally coalesce in the music world.

“Our influences are all over the place,” Duncan said. “I think the diversity comes from the fact that all three of us independently listen to a whole bunch of different music, and each of us bring in a piece of what we’re listening to.”

Although he acknowledges himself as the main songwriter and lyricist, Duncan describes his group as a “triumvirate – ruling over no one.”

“I think a pitfall for many bands is having the songs all come from one place, with only one person writing them all the time,” he said.

“We try to write from a bunch of different places to constantly shake ourselves up, so that we’re always doing something different.”

The band’s challenging attitude also pervades in Duncan’s lyrical content, with many of the album’s songs drawing on dark, weighty subjects uncommon in the majority of rock music.

“A lot of the record is pretty heavily informed by my disdain for the Bush administration,” Duncan said. “A few songs like ‘The Bug’ are about the distance between us and our government, which is supposed to be of us and by us but is now its own separate business.”

“It’s not just that I’m upset about everything going on; it’s also because nobody’s really talking about it, in music or the arts or anything.”

Duncan and his bandmates favor live atmosphere as the medium to communicate the messages evident in their music.

“Our live show is a moment for us to get up and really convey what the songs are about and sell it as what we think it is,” Duncan said.

He indicates that The Interiors’ live performances are “massively different” from its studio work – and to expect no less from the upcoming show, which marks the band’s first performance in the Classic City in eight years.

“We’ve always admired people who have a very different approach live than in the studio,” Duncan said. “It’s pretty boring when you just go and see a band play their record in front of you. I like to have a different experience.”