Tom Krell gave the latest How to Dress Well album a one-word title, but that one word is loaded with meaning.

Care includes songs about giving a damn about others on both a one-to-one level (“If you ever need a hand just let me know,” Krell sings on “Made a Lifetime”) and a society-wide one (as on “They’ll Take Everything You Have”, a lament for those marginalized by the class divide in the United States).

“For me, the value of restoring that on an interpersonal level is as a way of combating the rabid antisympathy that’s perpetuated on a sociopolitical level,” Krell, reached at a Los Angeles tour stop, says of the idea of caring. “If you learn to care for yourself or to care for someone else, you’re just literally yelling at the top of your lungs. If it happens in one register, it almost automatically clicks into place on the other register.

“So if you start to care for yourself in a true and fundamental way, then it changes your interpersonal relationships, and then that will echo out into the way you view things politically, or the way you see poverty or people on the streets, and things like that.

“Once you engage that relationship on any level, and involve yourself in the dynamics of care, where you have to admit that you’re in need—and in need of something which will not only pacify, but something which will actually nurture you to grow—you look around and you see the absence of that everywhere.”

That’s pretty deep stuff for an indie-pop record, especially one that kicks off with “Can’t You Tell”, a steamy, mid-tempo, R&B–informed celebration of boning. Krell says that in singing unapologetically about carnal matters, he’s keeping it real just as much as when he tackles the plight of the economically dispossessed.

“People want songs about real-life things that are not, like, false,” says the Chicago-based singer-producer, who records solo but performs live with a full band. “That’s why people like independent music, you know what I mean?

“And the weird thing is that independent music has been sort of sequestered into a very specific range of themes and acts, and sex hasn’t typically been one of them, let alone that kind of, like, rompy, joyous, freaky sex, you know? For some reason we’ve left that to commerce, which seems like a mistake.”

How to Dress Well’s fourth album, Care finds pop experimentalist Krell flirting with the mainstream more than he has in the past.

“Anxious”, for example, would be a serious contender if we were living in a world where earnest philosophy postgrads with soaring falsettos ruled the charts. As infectious as cuts such as “What’s Up” and “Lost Youth/Lost You” are, though, Krell admits his music isn’t for everyone. In fact, he knows specifically for whom it is definitely not.

“Somehow my music is super polarizing, and almost exclusively amongst a subset of heterosexual male listeners,” he notes. “I know there are gay guys, and gay and straight and otherwise women, who don’t like my music, but they don’t tend to have the same, like, ‘What is this? How dare he!’ response like a certain subset of straight guys.

“They have a really intensely defensive reaction to the tenderness or the vulnerability or something.”

Here’s hoping that, at least in this instance, Krell simply doesn’t care.

How to Dress Well plays the Biltmore Cabaret on Thursday (October 20).