Back in March 2008, Hamilton Leithauser’s band, the Walkmen, played a Sunday night show for 300 at an Atlanta bar. Their opening act flew down that day to make the gig: They’d just appeared on “Saturday Night Live,” to millions of viewers, the night before.
Vampire Weekend had just released their debut album, and they were blowing up practically overnight. The Walkmen, meanwhile, were struggling to maintain the momentum of their 2002 debut and its follow-up, “Bows + Arrows,” which had appeared on several year-end best lists for 2004.
The Walkmen kept plugging away, releasing, all told, seven consistently worthy albums. In late 2013, though, they announced they were going on “extreme hiatus.” Burnt-out band members turned to individual projects, with Leithauser, the group’s lead singer, retaining the highest profile. He put out his second solo album, “I Had a Dream That You Were Mine,” last September — in plenty of time to find himself enjoying another go-round on an impressive number of year’s-best lists.
Leithauser, who brings his current tour to the Sinclair Feb. 8, had a little help in collecting his latest round of critical acclaim. Technically, the new album is credited to “Hamilton Leithauser + Rostam.” That’s Rostam Batmanglij, who announced his departure from Vampire Weekend a year ago.
Advertisement
Speaking on the phone from a tour stop in Colorado, Leithauser says he’s only really gotten to know Rostam (the producer and multi-instrumentalist’s mononymous stage name) over the last couple of years, since he began working at Rostam’s home studio.
“We sort of clicked as friends pretty quick,” says Leithauser. They were both raised in Washington, D.C.; both had been part of the New York City rock revival of the early ’00s. The first day they sat down together, Leithauser recalls, they banged out the framework for “1959,” the fluttering, fairytale-ish song that closes “I Had a Dream.”
Advertisement
Their collaboration has pushed Leithauser in welcome new directions, he says. His ragged-but-right voice — he’s forever a dreamer in a scuzzy back alley— soars on the longing “A 1000 Times” and chokes with emotion on “In a Black Out,” which has the acoustic chamber quality of an old Simon & Garfunkel classic.
“It’s always gonna sound like me,” says Leithauser, now a father pushing 40, half-apologizing. “I’ve got to make an effort to get out of my comfort zone.” (“I use the sa-a-ame voice I always have,” he repeats, drawing out the vowels, on “Sick as a Dog.”)
Rostam’s strong ideas about technique and arrangement have stretched that comfort zone considerably. Electric guitars are all but absent on several tracks, giving way to judiciously deployed accents: plinking pianos and harpsichord, burbling saxophone, doo-wop backing vocals.
“We’ve had some heated discussions about vocal approaches,” Leithauser says. “He’s very involved, always trying to change the octave or the volume, and I’ll push back.”
The Walkmen played the inaugural Boston Calling festival in 2013. (The series is co-curated by Aaron Dessner of another fellow New York band, the National.) That was a homecoming of sorts for Leithauser, who spent a few years here in the late 1990s, studying philosophy at Boston University.
His first band, the Recoys, knocked around the Boston scene before moving to New York, where Leithauser and bass player/organist Peter Matthew Bauer formed the Walkmen with three former members of Jonathan Fire*Eater. (Like Leithauser and Bauer, they were from Washington.)
Advertisement
The Recoys “played the Rathskeller right before it closed, T.T. the Bear’s, the Middle East,” Leithauser recalls. “We would beg our friends to come.” After a few trips around the circuit (“we’d run the gamut in Boston”), they played a show in New York on a Sunday at midnight and quickly drew offers to play several other venues. Leithauser soon transferred to New York University.
For about six years, he worked a day job at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, joining the production team on the institution’s massive, digitized Timeline of Art History. Though he was loath to admit it, wary of seeming pretentious, he was inspired by the setting.
“I’d walk the galleries and find myself writing music,” he says. “It’s inspiring, being around and looking at great stuff.”
It was he who found the vintage Lewis Hine photo — three young newsboys smoking cigarettes — that appears on the cover of the Walkmen’s first album. “I Had a Dream” features an appropriately surreal cover image by the late photojournalist Bill Brandt.
Though Leithauser loves to look at paintings, too, photos, he says, work better as album covers, which so often appear these days as tiny thumbnails: “Plus, a portrait of a face — that photographic image is just so expressive, so immediate.”
Much like his songs, which may only be intensifying in texture and depth. On the road, he reports with evident surprise, all the shows have been selling out. (Rostam, who recently moved to Los Angeles, has been dropping in when his schedule permits; he is not expected to make an appearance in Boston.)
Advertisement
There are plenty of fans of the Walkmen who still don’t realize he was the lead singer, Leithauser says. Striking out on his own, “I had to build it from scratch.
“It’s still exciting, and terrifying, being billed under my own name.”
Hamilton Leithauser
At the Sinclair, 52 Church St., Cambridge, Feb. 8. $20-$23, www.sinclaircambridge.com
James Sullivan can be reached at jamesgsullivan@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter @sullivanjames.