After Mac DeMarco left Vancouver for Montreal, the lo-fi artist abandoned the Makeout Videotape moniker he had worked under for a handful of releases, opting to go by his birth name for last year’s steamy breakthrough release, Rock and Roll Night Club. The singer-guitarist is quick to clarify, however, that the erotically charged late-night pop platter was his solo debut in name only.

“Makeout Videotape was always just me, anyways. I recorded with a person here or there, but it was the same thing,” he explains over his cellphone as he and his current bandmates cruise down an Illinois highway, en route to Toronto. “Rock and Roll Night Club was definitely different than anything I had done before, so it was a good place to switch it up.”

While still marked with the intentionally dizzying, warped-tape fidelity of his earlier work, Rock and Roll Night Club’s songs were slowed down significantly in postproduction to wring every ounce of salaciousness out of their swaggering lite-funk licks. DeMarco’s de facto baritone, meanwhile, runs haughty as he fetishizes a woman’s finest pair of figure-hugging Lee’s (“Baby’s Wearing Blue Jeans”) or slyly recounts how he struts his stuff down the street (both “I’m a Man” and “Moving Like Mike” have this covered).

“I wasn’t really taking it seriously, and I didn’t think it would come out on a real record label, or even have a physical release. I thought I’d just put some funny songs up on the Internet,” he says, noting the songs were uploaded to Bandcamp before being pressed by New York buzz label Captured Tracks, which also quickly issued the follow-up, 2. While the sexed-up nature of Rock and Roll Night Club brought DeMarco attention over at Pitchfork and Stereogum, he attempted to tone things down for his latest LP.

“I had to reel it in, I guess, and do something that I thought was more me. I wrote songs about my life and sang in my own voice. I wasn’t doing these rock ’n’ roll cliché weird songs.”

While the Harry Nilsson–esque, bass-poppin’ opener, “Cooking Up Something Good”, tells the tale of the town’s most respected meth dealer, 2 generally has DeMarco dealing with themes of the heart. Acoustic strummer “Still Together” finds him caught up in a hammock-swinging breeze, waxing falsetto on a lifelong romance, while the woozy, organ-drenched “My Kind of Woman” likewise lets the songwriter pledge his allegiance to his beloved. His passion isn’t reserved for flesh and blood, though, with the cloudy, soft-rock jangler “Ode to Viceroy” acting as an a.m. serenade to his favourite cigarette.

Despite the preciousness of these songs, a raunchy rep still surrounds DeMarco, in part due to stories of his cramming fingers into his various orifices on-stage, or delivering between-songs dick jokes to the crowd in a husky Wolfman Jack voice.

“I don’t think I’m really that sketchy. I like to get drunk sometimes and weird stuff may happen, but I think I’m a mellow, pretty normal guy for the most part,” DeMarco protests. When the conversation steers toward his upcoming tour with highly touted French outfit Phoenix, though, he admits that he and his crew aren’t exactly clean-cut for the masses. “Why would they want to tour with us? We’re kind of jerks on-stage—we make fun of the audience sometimes, do lewd things, and say weird stuff; they’re, like, a presentable, nice indie band.”

The fact is the sweetness of DeMarco’s songbook is catching on, and if he needs to get through a number on-stage with a gap-toothed grin on his face and a thumb up his ass, who are we to judge?