When the Straight calls TJ Cowgill at home in Seattle, the singer-songwriter also known as King Dude proves to be an engaging conversationalist on subjects that include the Manson Family and the Church of Satan.

The guy has a lot to say about a lot of different things. There’s one topic Cowgill can’t seem to avoid, however.

“I’m doing a lot of interviews lately, and they’re asking me a lot of questions about sex,” he says. “I should have known this was going to come. You name an album Sex, you’re going to get asked ‘Why’d you name your album Sex?’ ”

The simple answer to that question is that the title of the latest King Dude LP—which comes out this Friday (October 28) on Cowgill’s own label, Not Just Religious Music—was inevitable. Sex is the latest installment in a series of thematic releases that began with 2011’s Love and continued with 2014’s Fear.

“I’ve already planned this all out,” Cowgill reveals. “So I know what the next record’s going to be called and I know what the record after that is going to be called. Which is kind of weird.

“I know a lot of people don’t work this way, but for the kind of mind I have, I suppose, a lot of order keeps me from getting distracted, keeps me on task, and I’m able to complete projects pretty efficiently.”

Sonically, Sex is one of King Dude’s most eclectic efforts, encompassing bass-guitar-propelled punk (“Holy Christos”), greasy garage rawk (“Swedish Boys”), way-past-midnight piano balladry (“Shine Your Light”), and organ-fortified gloom (“The Leather One”, which sounds like an undead Doors tribute band fronted by Jim Morrison’s bloated corpse).

For “The Girls”, he even swaps his usual sepulchral bass-baritone croon for an affectedly fey English accent, landing somewhere between Donovan Leitch and Genesis P-Orridge.

As for the themes explored, song titles such as “Prisoners”, “Sex Dungeon (USA)”, and “Conflict & Climax” should be enough to tell you that this isn’t King Dude’s version of As Nasty As They Wanna Be. Instead, Sex finds Cowgill poking around in the darkest, grimiest corners of the human psyche.

“Yeah,” the 37-year-old tunesmith agrees, “I think I might be there all the time anyways, trying to explore the places that other people might not be too comfortable exploring normally—or they try to keep things a little bit lighter. But I’d rather get to the nitty-gritty, the core, the ideas that we don’t really strike upon all the time.

“I didn’t want to make a Blowfly-sounding album, or David Allen Coe, crass. It was important to me that there wasn’t anything too explicit on the album about sex, because that’s just cheap.”

Cowgill was concerned enough with avoiding the perception of vulgar exploitation that he considered calling the album something else. He realized in the end, however, that any other name would be a cop-out. Sex is the title because sex is the subject, and it’s not one King Dude takes lightly.

“It’s as important as love or fear, but it’s completely different,” Cowgill says. “But it involves both of those things. It’s one of the biggest things that we have to work through as individuals, as people. It motivates people, probably more than they think about on a daily basis.

“It can completely change somebody. And it is a profound subject that’s taboo in some cultures. It needs to be meditated upon, so that’s what the record is.”

King Dude plays the Astoria on Sunday (October 30).