Right from the moment he picks up his cellphone in a crowded Reykjavík Airport, the mono-named man known as Mugison is an interviewer’s dream. Even though he has every reason to be distracted—along with his dad and his three-year-old son, he’s picking up a package—he gives each question his undivided attention. He’s easily excited, and not just when he talks about landing the opening slot on Queens of the Stone Age’s upcoming North American tour. And he’s funnier than hell, delivering one-liners like a Laugh Factory up-and-comer.

“I could play in the toilet in the places we’ll be playing with Queens of the Stone Age, and that would be a step up,” he offers with a laugh. “The last time I played L.A., there were, like, 20 people there. Actually, the women’s toilet would be a step up—and it would also be fun.”

What’s best about Mugison, though, is that he’s happy to help a brother out. Perhaps aware that the hardest part of writing about music is trying to describe, well, the music, he volunteers all kinds of descriptions for his songs, doing so with a flair that makes him sound like an Icelandic version of the late Lester Bangs. Take, for example, “Jesus Is a Good Name to Moan”, a thumping rush of psychedelicized pop off his third and latest album, Mugiboogie.

“I made some earlier electronic versions that sounded good in cafés—like if you were high on cocaine in New York,” Mugison reveals. “I really liked the song, but I never got it to where I’d finish a session and go ‘Fucking hell—that’s something else.’ Close to the end of the record, we said, ‘Let’s just give this one more take, like live rock ’n’ roll.’

“The sound you hear,” he continues with a snort, “is us really, really, really, horny. We wanted a masturbation feel—like we were watching 300 women masturbating in front of us. Once we imagined that, the take was there.”

Forget thinking of it as the work of one songwriter. Mugison would rather have Mugiboogie seen as a greatest-hits collection of artists who have nothing in common but being on top of their game. It somehow makes sense, then, that the soft-focus Americana of “George Harrison” coexists with the junkyard boogie-funk of “The Animal”, the industrial death-grind of “Two Thumb Sucking Son of a Boyo”, and the 4-in-the-morning acoustic-indie blues of “My Love I Love”. The scope of the album is doubly impressive when you consider Mugison—who plays with backing musicians today—started out as a sort of bedroom project, with the fellow known as Örn Elías Guðmundsson to his dad creating glitch-rock oddities with a laptop and a guitar.

“I was doing this solo schizophrenic, acoustic-electronica thing for a few years,” Mugison notes. “Then I met this beautiful girl, she made me horny, and when you’re horny you just want to play the guitar. Also, I’ve got two boys now. Before I was doing electronica and also some love songs. It doesn’t look good, though, if your dad is Julio Iglesias, or even Four Tet. You want your dad to be in Sepultura. That’s why I changed.”

Mugison opens for Queens of the Stone Age at the PNE Forum on Wednesday (April 30).