There’s no point making a solo record unless you’re going to do something fans won’t expect. On that front Kyle Morton executes almost perfectly on What Will Destroy You.

The key word there is almost, because as the Portland-based singer notes from Los Angeles, the first record where he goes it alone isn’t a complete departure from the themes he explores with his full-time Portlandia project Typhoon. For proof of that, look no further than What Will Destroy You’s haunting leadoff track, “Poor Bastard”. A winning exercise in glitchy antifolk, the track begins with Morton singing “I awoke inside a coffin/Being lowered into the ground.” Evidently, you can take the boy out of the orchestral 11-member Typhoon, but you can’t take an obsession with death out of the boy. You can, however, put a twist on things.

“What Will Destroy You sort of walks near the darkness a bit,” the wonderfully outgoing Morton says, speaking on his cellphone. “But I also think it has its funnier moments, where, say, Typhoon doesn’t have that comic side. I mean, the first song on the record is kind of a parody of the character that I’ve become with Typhoon, which is sort of death-obsessed. Someone asked me ‘Why do you always write about death?’ And I was like, ‘Well, on this record I only do a little bit.’ ”

If mortality is often on Morton’s mind, that probably has plenty to do with a childhood marked by multiple organ failures thanks to Lyme disease. For the stripped-down and often skeletal What Will Destroy You, however, he was more interested in what makes life worth living—namely, love.

Fittingly, the singer comes at the most complex of human emotions in many ways. The devastating “The Aftermath” details a reconnect between two former lovers with lines like “Seducer’s calculus/I feigned an accident/Reached out and grazed your neck,” this ending the morning after with “And when I leave you will own my nothing/When I leave it will mean nothing.”

All grey-November guitars and ghost-world vocals, “Survivalist Fantasy” sets love in a postapocalyptic world where two survivors are having serious trouble keeping the flame going thanks to a lack of outside stimulus.

But lest one think that What Will Destroy You is more depressing than Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, things come to a life-affirming end with the celestial country ballad “My Little Darlin Knows My Nature”. That’s where the observation “But every year I am getting older/And I lose my good looks, lose my charms” is offset by this album-ending ode to a loved one: “I will be your witness if you be my wife.”

While the temptation might be to assume that Morton is unlucky in love, that couldn’t be further from the truth, the singer having married his girlfriend of nearly a decade in 2016. Just because he’s obsessed with death with Typhoon doesn’t mean that he’s convinced life isn’t worth living. On that note, he couldn’t be more excited about stepping out from the considerable shadow of Typhoon for a solo tour.

“As anyone can see if they listen to my songs, I’m capable of some despair,” Morton says with a laugh. “Despite the general climate of the past year, which has been, um, lunacy with one absurdity after another, personally, I got married in 2016 and I’ve been happier than I’ve ever been. That’s an encouraging thought. I don’t know if anyone expects things to get much better as you get older, but for me it’s been an upward trend. One can write out of despair and it can be beautiful. And on the flip side, one can write out of a kind of euphoria, and even though the songs aren’t necessarily elated, that was the case on this end.”

Kyle Morton plays the Rickshaw on Monday (January 9).