Make no mistake about it: “2 Heads” is a banger. Its thumping beat and rallying cry of “Hoo-hoo” are going to sound fantastic blasting from festival stages when Coleman Hell hits the circuit this summer.

At its heart, though, the song—a Top 10 hit on both the Canadian rock and U.S. alternative charts—is a lament, with its narrator nursing fresh wounds to his heart and pleading to the object of his affection, “If only I could hold you longer.”

Reached on the road in Chicago, Hell says the song’s seemingly self-contradictory nature—it’s a hanky-clutching tale of romantic disillusion that you can shake your ass to—is entirely by design.

“I think people come to music for different things at different times in their life,” the Toronto-based musician notes. “So I think if you’re going through a breakup or something, the words of ‘2 Heads’ will resonate with you. But if you’re just trying to have fun at a festival, maybe the words aren’t as important to you. I want my songs to be versatile in that sense. I want them to be able to serve both purposes.”

The Thunder Bay–born Hell’s music is multifaceted in other respects, as well. As heard on his self-titled sophomore EP, he takes a classic singer-songwriter approach to his material, but the finished product is buoyed by dance-floor-friendly rhythms and a glossy pop sound. Hell reveals that, although he taught himself how to make music in his bedroom with a synthesizer, he grew up under the spell of his parents’ Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen LPs.

“I like to make sure that the stripped-down, bare-bones version of the song is a great song, and then I go from there and try to make it more upbeat or something,” he says. “I want it to have a whole lot of meaning, but I also want it to be entertaining live, and to make people want to dance, so I try to combine those two feelings.”

Hell’s style has been described as electro-folk or folktronica, and if you liked the sampled banjo lick that serves as one of the sharpest hooks in “2 Heads”, you’re probably going to love what the man has in store on his forthcoming full-length album. His aim, he says, is to employ roots-music instruments in a modern-pop context. Expect to hear harmonica and lap-steel guitar, but not necessarily in a way you’ve ever heard them used before.

“There’s something to be said about using a real instrument but playing it synthetically,” says Hell, who explains that the instruments are being sampled, with their tones then triggered on a synth. “It has a different attack—it just sounds different. You can’t really play it in real life like that. It sounds unnatural, which I really like, and that’s kind of what I’ve been trying to go with on a lot of the new music.”

Coleman Hell opens for Twenty One Pilots at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre on Sunday and Monday (April 10 and 11).