Patrick Watson has been releasing albums for a decade and a half, but despite his obvious passion for his chosen profession, the Montreal songwriter now finds other pursuits to be more fertile than music.

“I love reading about quantum mechanics. I love physics; I find physics super touching and super fascinating,” he tells the Straight, on the line from a tour stop in Illinois. “We’re in the era where most of the creative fields are in sciences. We’re in an era where what they are exploring is weirder than any song anybody’s put out in the last hundred years.”

This outlook provided the spark for Watson’s most recent album, Love Songs for Robots, which finds the singer and his eponymous band venturing into futuristic sonic territory that represents a significant departure from the chamber pop and lush indie rock they have typically favoured over the years. “I realized that a lot of our records are very folk-feeling, but all I read is science journals and science-fiction stories,” Watson notes of the new LP’s genesis. “I just wanted to find a way to make all of those discussions touching and put them in a human context.”

Watson—along with guitarist Simon Angell, bassist Mishka Stein, and drummer Robbie Kuster—sought to achieve this science-minded sound by incorporating analogue synthesizers into their setup and finding inspiration in the 1982 sci-fi film Blade Runner.

The frontman asks, “Do you remember Blade Runner, the colours in that film? It’s pretty science-y, but you don’t ever think about that because it’s [set in] a dirty city. It’s pretty human. Really dark red, kind of sensual. All of that stuff is what I wanted the record to sound like.”

This multifaceted aesthetic can be heard on the standout cut “Good Morning Mr. Wolf”, which ping-pongs between cloud-scraping postrock crescendos and gentle ukulele comedowns. Elsewhere on Love Songs for Robots, the celestial orchestrations of “Bollywood” have more in common with Kid A than with the film movement that inspired its title, while the sprawling “Turn Into the Noise” is a collision of cabaret grandeur and interstellar soul balladry. Ethereal ambient tones frequently go toe to toe with acoustic guitar or piano, while Watson’s tender falsetto is placed at the forefront.

To capture this uniquely human approach to synthesizer music, the players recorded live off the floor without a click track, in sessions that took place at Hollywood’s revered Capitol Studios.

“It was just old-school: you’ve got Nat King Cole’s piano, Frank Sinatra’s microphone. It’s a pretty inspiring place. We just did a couple of live takes, took the best one, did a couple of overdubs, and moved on.”

Despite the band’s overhauled approach, Watson hopes that fans don’t define Love Songs for Robots by its instrumental palette.

“If you heard electronic music and you didn’t think it was electronic music,” he offers, “I would say that would be success.”

Patrick Watson plays the Commodore Ballroom on Monday (October 5).