Wild Child’s Alexander Beggins suggests that fans of his Austin-based band will have little trouble connecting the new full-length Expectations to past records. A definite sense of melancholy runs through the album’s 12 tracks, but the main message seems to be that it’s great to be alive, with art indeed reflecting reality.

“I think that all of the songs on all of our records kind of stem from the same open place in our journals,” Beggins says, on his cellphone in a tour van that’s headed to Lawrence, Kansas. “It’s all kind of laid out in chronological order, like a window into what’s happened in our personal lives.”

To dissect Expectations is to conclude that Beggins and his fellow singer-songwriter Kelsey Wilson continue to go through rough patches on the romance front. After starting out with a small child intoning “Silly Alex—don’t think that way,” the lead-off track, “Alex”, gets serious with lines like “I want to hold you close/You’re acting like I want to hold you down.” Featuring ghost-town guitar violence and gorgeously downcast cello, “My Town” has Wilson wringing every bit of torchy emotion out of “Get out of my heart and my head.”

“We’ve been writing some of these songs for the past couple of years,” Beggins says. “I was in a long, kind of unhealthy relationship, and a lot of writing was sort of a reflection of that relationship. Our last record, Fools, dealt with the sadness that comes with the aftermath of a relationship. This one is more about inward reflection. The song ‘Alex’ in particular is about that voice that you hear in your head that you’re always battling. Having a little girl go ‘Alex—don’t think that way’ makes it a little more fun, but the message is ultimately ‘Try not to take yourself too seriously.’ ”

He continues with, “Then you’ll get a song like ‘My Town’, which is self-explanatory. It’s like, ‘This is my town, my friends, and my place.’ It’s not like, ‘Woe is me.’ It’s more confident and bold, like a statement that you’ve realized everything is going to be okay.”

Lyrically, then, the message of Expectations is that sometimes you have to dig deep through the tough times. Musically, Wild Child shows why it’s one of the great indie acts of America. Drawing on everything from orchestral DIY pop to sugar-smacked soul to stripped-down Americana, the group salted Expectations with Easter eggs like the ghost-of-Phil-Collins drums in “Think It Over”.

Even when you practically smell the instant coffee and yellowed kitchen linoleum in the bare-bones breakup ballad “The One”, the group’s message is that it’s great to be alive.

Part of that might be because the members of Wild Child had a completely life-affirming time recording Expectations. Rather than book themselves into a single studio for a month, they recorded with multiple producers across the globe, from Philadelphia to Tromsø, Norway to Wilson’s abandoned childhood home in Texas.

“It made the record more fun,” Beggins says. “I think that’s because there was this complete lack of pressure. Our label [Dualtone] gave us the green light to take as long as we needed. Having that kind of leash proved really helpful. The thinking was ‘Let’s go into this session and be willing to try anything, and we don’t have to use it if we don’t like it.’ ”

In the spirit of past Wild Child records, then, even during down times the last thing the singer and his bandmates are interested in is morose navel-gazing.

“There’s a real beauty in sadness, and that’s something that I think about a lot,” he says, “A good buddy of mine—an old college roommate—was engaged and then everything kind of fell apart. His father told him ‘This is the worst thing ever, but the good thing is that not a lot of people get to experience this feeling, this amount of pain and sadness. So you should kind of cherish this, and reflect on these kinds of moments.’ That’s always really stuck with me, and I’ve really tried to make sure that kind of feeling comes out in my work—the idea of finding something good in something really bad.”

Wild Child plays the Fox Cabaret on Thursday (April 26).