“I got tired of sadness/ I got tired of all the madness/ I got tired of bein’ a badass all the time,” Matthew Houck sings on “Revelator,” the opener and title track of his latest Phosphorescent album. Houck was actively looking for something new, an epiphany, when the old ways stopped working. And just as the album Revelator only revealed itself to its author along the way, so too did real life revelations take their time answering the plaintive mission statement with which Houck reintroduces Phosphorescent.

“This record is a lot more open-ended and ephemeral,” Houck explains, noting the more plainly autobiographical documentation of C’est La Vie has been upended by something less knowable, more unsettled.

The new album "Revelator" is out now.