You wouldn’t know it from the opulent, often orchestral sounds of Hamilton Leithauser’s 2014 solo debut, Black Hours, but the onetime Walkmen singer grew up a punk.

As a teen in the ’90s, he helped record Fugazi albums as an assistant engineer at Arlington, Virginia’s famed Inner Ear Studios, and caught politically charged sets across the Potomac from D.C. icons Nation of Ulysses.

Though a recent quick-and-trashy recording session for the Daytrotter website had Leithauser and a couple of pals pounding through the latter’s spirited and speedy “The Sound of Young America”, chances are he won’t be reviving the spirit of his first band, Opus 88.

“It was just loud crap that was cycling around D.C. at the time. There were a million bands just like us,” he says with a self-deflating laugh over the phone from an Austin, Texas, tour stop.

Further maligning his part in hardcore history, he adds: “Those were the days when you couldn’t get through a show. You’d get through one-and-a-half songs and the drums would fall over, or you’d break a string and change it for 10 minutes.”

Despite generally trafficking in slower tempos these days, the now New York–based singer-songwriter is working at a breakneck pace. It’s been a year since he delivered Black Hours, an elegant solo effort that came after logging a dozen-plus years with indie vets the Walkmen, and there’s already another three releases on the way. A vinyl-only album called Dear God is at the pressing plant and due sometime this summer. He’ll also be issuing a “rock ’n’ roll record” that was partly tracked at Inner Ear, and he’s been working on a full-length with Vampire Weekend member Rostam Batmanglij, a collaborator whom Leithauser describes as a “freight train” of productivity.

“I’d always been part of a slow-and-steady, day-in-day-out thing with the Walkmen; we would get together and work on things for a couple weeks,” Leithauser explains. “With Rostam, it’s just bam, bam, bam—hammering things out. It’s great! It’s a live, frantic energy that you can probably hear in their [Vampire Weekend’s] music.”

For Black Hours, the pair produced the doo wop-dabbling “I Retired” and “Alexandra”, a firecracker that solders the sounds of “Maggie’s Farm” folk-rock to the full-grin force of a New York chorus line. According to Leithauser, both were written in under an hour.

The Walkmen may have gone on hiatus in 2013, but the band’s Paul Maroon is still closely linked to Leithauser, and served as a cowriter and producer on Black Hours. Album highlights from the long-time partners include the whisky-licked torch song “5 AM” and the marimba-centred bounce of “11 O’Clock Friday Night”. The full-figured symphony strings that swell throughout bonus track “Waltz” are about as jaw-droppingly gorgeous as a Tuscan summer sunrise.

Refined rock tracks like “The Smallest Splinter” recall the Walkmen, but the songwriter is happy wrapping his salty croon around a variety of styles. He laughs when he’s reminded of an older interview with the Straight where he explained how the Walkmen abandoned the original reggae groove of their “On the Water” after self-consciously pondering, “Are guys like us allowed to play this kind of music?” These days, he’s all for the experimentation.

“I don’t want to sound like the Walkmen, otherwise I would just play with them,” he says of his current ambitions. “You do find yourself going into random directions and wondering, ‘Can I play this thing? Do I want to? Is this who I am?’”

With three more albums on the way, it won’t be long before we learn the answers.

Hamilton Leithauser plays Venue next Thursday (June 4).