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Sam Welch, by design, does not do easy-listening music to create moods or feelings. The lyrics and music go need listening. He wants his audience to put some work into his songs.

Though the lyrics are about thoughts — metaphysics, if you will — and deal with things like relationships, life, death and the hereafter, his music gives a wry twist that makes thinking interesting, trending toward fun.

And worth the work.

As an example, “Kamikaze Co-Pilot,” the single he is featuring from his new album, Last Night on Earth. Right there, in the two titles, you can see the metaphysical and the twist at work.

This is Sam talking about the message, or messages, of “Kamikaze”: “I’ve defined my own philosophical interpretation of this song, and I’m calling it ‘social existentialism.’ Basically, it’s the idea that every relationship will come to an end, this idea that everybody’s on the same journey to their destiny, but that the journey in and of itself will divide us and separate us.”

Sounds heavy, but the song begins with his voice, a high-register, floating, ethereal vocalization set to a ringing instrumental that rises for three notes, falls back, and drums enter with an upbeat tempo. Ten seconds later, a saxophone leads in the lyrics:

Kamikaze co-pilot the future can’t come soon enough

Kamikaze co-pilot well this world is getting tough

Gonna fly away with you it’s the past that I rue

Gonna fly away it ain’t the future that is true

“I think if I had done a really, really sort of hard techno, unrelentingly loud or aggressive, it wouldn’t support the themes that I’m exploring,” said Sam.

“Kamikaze co-pilot,” he pointed out, is an oxymoron. Who in their right mind would co-pilot with someone on a suicide mission? And yet, he says, human relationships and life, composed of individuals, are like that.

But Last Night on Earth does not preach, it explores.

His music, too, is an exploration. His previous output, which he called “transcendental techno vox,” is giving way to more melody and instrumentation and less harmonization and vocal distortion. The transcendental remains, but the techno is much reduced.

Sam has begun to play with his voice and his music. One song on the album, “Man in My Mind,” could pass for a dance track.

His vocals, almost entirely undoubled and undistorted, are much more prominent in each of the 11 tracks. Fewer mixed harmonies and more of his own voice have been goals

“In each of these songs, I’ve provided a lead vocal melody line, a solo voice. I think I’m doing a good job of controlling the urge to just create more harmonization.”

“I think every album that I do is better than the album before,” he said. “I’m always trying to improve the quality of my music, and I feel like I’ve definitely reached some new goals in terms of this album. I have worked very hard on trying to create a very organic sound that supports the very, very rich themes that I’m exploring poetically. The two things support each other.”

Another goal, to produce an album each year, has been reached every year, beginning in 2017. He had several albums before that, including one called Unitarian Hymns, in 2005.

He has studied piano since age 8 and received voice training at Columbia University and the Longy School of Music. He started a barbershop quartet in high school and participated in classical chorus performances and theater. At Columbia, he toured with the male a cappella group The Kingsmen. He has written and recorded music since 2001. This year, he has begun live performances.

In his music, he explores “the convergence between themes of spiritual transcendence and emotional disregulation.” He knows the first through his life as a practicing Unitarian and the second from his own bouts with depression and psychosis as a young man.

“‘Kamikaze Co-Pilot,’ the headliner for the album, is sort of about humanity and relationships and destiny and the misfortune of having to die, which we all do,” he said. “It’s more relationship oriented than I’ve been in the past, but still with the emphasis on transcendence and moving along.”

In Last Night on Earth, consideration of relationships, transcendence, “emotional disregulation,” life, eternity, all come together, poetically, musically, playfully.

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