For Yoni Wolf, lead singer of indie band Why?, life has been plagued by health problems. Affecting him in various ways for the last decade, Wolf’s illnesses informed much of the darker, experimental feel of the four-piece’s music. But after a recent serious health scare in Central America caught the singer off guard, he began to change his outlook on both the world and his recording style.

“I always have some kind of issue going on,” he tells the Straight on the line from Chicago. “What happened in Costa Rica, though, was particularly rough. When I started having problems, there were no hospitals or anything like that anywhere near me. I remember talking to my family about possibly doing a helicopter airlift into San Jose or New York, or anywhere in the States. In the end, I went back to this little clinic and got some tests done, and it turned out that I’d be all right to travel back normally and deal with it when I got home.

“I had a certain peace and calmness on that return trip,” he continues. “I realized that everything is okay, even death. And that whatever happens, I’ll be fine. I was looking at everybody’s faces when I was travelling, and I was feeling a lot of love. I don’t always feel that when observing strangers. I felt a lot of empathy for the people around me, and like I really tapped into that frequency. Now I’m trying to maintain that sentiment in my life—to try and see the positives a little more than I have been. It’s always a struggle, but I’m working on it.”

While Wolf’s experience in Costa Rica wasn’t explicitly immortalized in the band’s songs, Why?’s latest album, Moh Lhean, showcases a more uplifting vibe. Writing lyrics that lack the acerbic cynicism of past records and creating a looseness and warmth in each composition, Wolf and his bandmates have traded discussions of committing suicide with a phone cord on 2008’s Alopecia for softer, sweeping psychedelic harmonies between the new tracks’ stuttering guitar and instrumental lines.

Despite its mellower vibe, however, Why?’s typically introspective music is no less self-reflective on Moh Lhean. Drawing on the philosophical themes that run throughout the album, the group expressed its deep-thinking agenda in the visuals for the first single from the album, “This Ole King”, filmed in 360-degree video.

“We messed with the idea of time in that clip,” Wolf says. “There’s a lot of stuff that happens backwards. The kids are burned in reverse, for example, and the people that come to clean up the children’s ashes begin the scene, even though we only see the fires at the end. It’s about the idea that everything exists outside of the construct of time. Everything is present at once. We are both ourselves in this moment and ourselves before we were born and ourselves when we are dead. It sounds a little heady, but we had fun with it.

“With this album, we did everything ourselves—all the concepts, and all the recording,” he continues. “We’re trying to make everything tighter and more engaging and not be so overblown. Moh Lhean has been about just doing more with less.”

Why? plays Venue on Saturday (March 25)