The cover of the new Autre Ne Veut album, Anxiety, features a photo of a wooden picture frame being handled gingerly by two men, their faces unseen, who are clad in black aprons and white gloves. Like a Rorschach test, it’s an image that can represent whatever the individual viewer/listener brings to it. That seems apt when you consider that Autre Ne Veut’s sole proprietor, Arthur Ashin, has a master’s degree in psychology. It turns out, however, that this wasn’t the cover that the Brooklyn-based musician had in mind. The white-gloved figures are actually employees of Sotheby’s, and in the original version of the photo, the frame contains Edvard Munch’s harrowing depiction of mental anguish, The Scream, which sold for a record-setting US$119,922,500 at an auction last May.

“The title of the record was Anxiety for a long time,” Ashin explains when the Straight reaches him on the road in Chicago. “It felt like the theme that ran between all of the songs, for me. Not so much an anxiety-disorder kind of anxiety, but a basic human anxiety—of relating to other people, of trying to be a human being in the world. But also a more universal cultural anxiety: the anxiety of the way that we are kind of forced to interface with one another, through media and through capitalist frameworks and stuff like that.

“I was trying to get at all those things, and when I saw The Scream go on sale—there was this AP photo, it was in the New York Times or whatever—this image of two art handlers holding up The Scream was perfect. Obviously, The Scream as a painting itself is fine, but it’s not really the point, to me. What that image encapsulates so beautifully is this historicized moment of the sale of the most expensive painting of all time. The image itself was so beautiful—the framing of the image of the art handlers holding the image was so beautiful—but also it’s like this modernist trope of existential anxiety, placed in what I consider to be the anxious context of the capitalist framework.”

Due to copyright issues, the Munch painting had to be blacked out, but that doesn’t faze Ashin. “The process of having The Scream there, and then it disappearing, effectively tells the story that I wanted to tell anyway,” he asserts.

If this lends the impression that Ashin puts a lot of thought into the details, a listen to Anxiety bears this out. With Ashin’s highly emotive singing (and his tendency to break into an unrestrained falsetto wail) at the centre, the 10 songs walk a tense tightrope between the accessibility of contemporary R & B and the left-field leanings of experimental electronic pop. In other words, fans of How to Dress Well’s angst-fraught future soul ought to take note. “We think about this stuff in really similar ways,” Ashin says of that act’s mastermind, Tom Krell. “We’re referencing music that we love in the music that we make.”

Anxiety is Autre Ne Veut’s second album, but it’s the first one to feature Ashin’s name in the credits. He chose to remain anonymous for his self-titled 2010 debut.

“When I released my first record I was really in the middle of having made the decision to follow the clinical psychology path, which is competitive, rigorous, and fairly conservative,” he says, explaining that he was hoping to avoid having certain aspects of his music career come to the attention of the overseeing board of the American Psychological Association.

“Because all you need is some interest in your music and you’re shooting to the top of your name’s Google search,” Ashin says. “But having those [top results] be YouTube videos of me pantomiming masturbation or whatever seemed like it was a bad look for trying to get hired at a university.”

Considering his rapidly rising profile—upon its release, Anxiety was named Stereogum’s record of the week and was given a coveted “best new music” designation by the folks at Pitchfork—it would have been hard for Ashin to maintain his anonymity. Moreover, he has now decided that music is more important to him than clinical psychology ever was.

“In a moment of gut instinct, I decided that if you’re going to do something in life you should do it 100 percent,” Ashin says. “The door was cracked open, and I had my foot in it for about two years, and I hadn’t really given myself the chance to see what it would be like to try and do it all the way. It’s really symbolic for me, as much as anything else, to just go for it.”