The Wink is the first album Tim Presley has released using his own name, but thinking of it as his debut solo record gets into some hazy semantic territory.

The prolific Los Angeles–based musician usually puts his music out under the White Fence moniker, but White Fence also happens to be a solo project. So what’s the difference between The Wink and any of Presley’s previous outings?

For starters, it doesn’t contain anything that could really be described as psychedelic garage pop, which has been White Fence’s stock-in-trade for the past seven years. That style has been ascendant in the indie-rock underground, which was enough to convince Presley to try something else.

“I’m a real anti kind of guy sometimes, when it comes to the climate of things,” he admits when the Straight reaches him at home in L.A. “I mean, does the world really need another reverb-y, delayed-out, psychedelic thing? You know what I mean? In my mind, it doesn’t.

“I’m just trying to keep it fresh for myself, but not in a pretentious way. I think I have this weird anger inside me. It’s not, like, violent or anything, but it’s a healthy dose of anger, and sometimes it comes out in sounds and stuff like that.”

The Wink isn’t a particularly angry-sounding album, but the wiry attack of a track like “Long Bow”—with its clean vocals, dry and jagged shards of guitar, and driving rhythms—at least suggests Presley was determined not to repeat himself. He credits frequent collaborator Cate Le Bon, who produced The Wink, with shaping the record’s willfully off-kilter aesthetic.

“I showed Cate probably about 30, 40 demos or home recordings that I had, that I probably could have just put out as a White Fence album,” Presley notes.

“But she helped me pick out a record’s worth of songs from that, and I think she leaned toward the more angular songs, and the ones that had more room to experiment with rather than a typical pop formation—verse-chorus-verse-chorus or something. So the song choice was pretty key in that, I think.”

Working with Warpaint drummer Stella Mozgawa and engineer Samur Khouja, Presley and Le Bon took an approach to recording and mixing—namely, paring the songs down to their essential elements—that diverged from Presley’s standard operating procedure.

“That was the thing with White Fence: I would just be in my room recording, and adding and adding as much as I could. And this was just the opposite; I was subtracting, and giving it space, I suppose, which was a new thing for me.”

Presley and Le Bon, who are currently on a coheadlining tour, are also bandmates in DRINKS, which released an LP in 2015 and has a follow-up in the mixing stage. As for his usual musical vehicle, Presley says he hasn’t retired the name, but that fans shouldn’t expect a new White Fence album in the near future.

In fact, he reveals that he has been exploring another type of creative outlet altogether.

“I’ve been painting a lot, actually. Whereas I would normally be in my room just recording nonstop, I’ve been painting in lieu of that, so that’s been kind of a nice break as well.”

Tim Presley and Cate Le Bon coheadline a show at the Fox Cabaret on Monday (January 16).