He surrounds himself with beauty, has everything he’s ever wanted and really, really loves his dog. So why is the Atlantan indie rocker writing about the killing of Jo Cox and the end of the world?

The door to Bradford Cox’s wood-framed house is unlocked, so I wander in. Set in a leafy bit of Atlanta, it is the kind of place that would make Marie Kondo freak out, with the entire contents of Cox’s brain seemingly emptied on to its handsome wooden furniture: a topography of shells, tools, vials and records. His voice calls out a greeting, digitally garbled through a loudspeaker, and a dog treat fires across the room. Faulkner, Cox’s stocky mutt, skids on to the kitchen floor. “I love you boy!”

Cox is on his way back in his Volvo, but is using an app to monitor, talk to and remotely feed Faulkner. “I love dogs more than humans,” he tells me later. “I don’t like hateful things. I like sweet dogs with velvet ears.”

As the frontman and creative engine of Deerhunter, Cox’s ambient rock music – forged at the crossroads of shoegaze, doo-wop and 60s psych – has made the five-piece one of the great US bands of the century. Their new album Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared? is terrifically bleak without being maudlin, beautifully sketching out worlds that are teetering or actually ending. But Cox, once ensconced in his home, is a picture of contentment. “The only great fear I have is losing my parents, or anyone in my family, and my dog,” he says. “I wish those things could last for ever, and then I would have heaven. I have everything I want.”

He has double-booked me, and apologises: would I mind going to his friend Michael Stipe’s birthday party? As inconveniences go, it ranks low, and so we head off to Athens, the next sizeable town to the east. This is where Cox grew up, poor, and had a tough childhood: complications resulting from Marfan syndrome left him his rake-thin profile, and required surgery and months in hospital. Succour eventually came from going to see bands such as Stereolab. “When I was just a boy at 12 or 13, [Stereolab co-founder] Tim Gane said to me his favourite word was ‘juxtaposition’. I remember that sticking out to me. And I said: ‘Well, that’ll be my favourite word, and my life will be devoted to juxtaposing.’”

At Stipe’s house, Cox does not seem particularly thrilled by the party element of the birthday party, and mostly wants to give Stipe his present, a painting by fellow Atlanta visionary Lonnie Holley. His lanky frame stiffens when we enter Stipe’s noisy kitchen, and we make fitful small talk next to Helena Christensen, Cox holding an untouched portion of cake as if out of duty. There is a great spread, but he would rather head off and eat elsewhere. We get back in the Volvo and head to a diner, where Deerhunter bassist Josh McKay happens to be sitting at another table. A journeyman Georgia indie rocker who once played in a band with River Phoenix, McKay replaced Josh Fauver, who later died young at 39, a subject Cox will not talk about. McKay and keyboardist Javier Morales had themselves dodged death the previous week, after a car smashed into theirs. Cox is not massively sympathetic, slightly scolding McKay for not buying his previous Volvo; McKay breathes his irritation in through his nose and swallows it.

There’s something uniquely toxic about this current situation, a new chemical scent that I’ve never smelled before Bradford Cox

It is the only glimpse all weekend of the frictions that have sometimes flared up in the band, that first formed in 2001. All the members seem to agree that they are in a better place now than when they were making previous records. Guitarist Lockett Pundt describes 2013’s Monomania as having “a kind of snarl, a lot of anger and resentment … the creation was kind of nightmarish”, but has recently noticed a “maturation in the band … we enjoy each other’s company more [now] than in the past”. McKay says they are like “misunderstood cousins” with Cox as “mum and dad in one”. Cox meanwhile, who writes the bulk of the band’s music as demos before the band refine it together, describes their creative process as: “This oil just erupted through the floor of the desert, but now we’re going to build a scaffolding around it.”

The waitress brings over the bill with a Deerhunter lyric quoted on top in Biro. The next day, Faulkner leads us around their cloudless Atlanta neighbourhood as we talk about town planning. In the local cafe, they know how Cox likes his tea: on ice, steeped for seven minutes. Where on earth has Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared?, “empirically a bummer record” according to Cox, come from amid this indie version of Eden?

“I’m basically trying to take a zeitgeist and run with it,” Cox says, back sitting in his living room. “There’s something uniquely toxic about this current situation, a new chemical scent that I’ve never smelled before. It’s like burning plastic.” Is Trump to blame for this social discord? “How can you blame one person? There’s a general narcissism, a general sense of meaninglessness, really. And the rush to synthesise some sort of meaning out of the versions of ourselves that we create and promote.” Not that it’s a bad thing for art he says: he was up late watching The Third Man, and quotes the Orson Welles line about the Italians having bloodshed and Michelangelo, and the Swiss having peace and the cuckoo clock. “It is an interesting way of framing human history: the worse it gets, art restates its value and necessity. In a peaceful and contented culture, art becomes subdued – all of its art is going to be based on designs for living. [Apple designer] Jonathan Ive is probably one of the most important modern artists,” he says, witheringly.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Bradford Cox on stage at Field Day, London, in 2016. Photograph: Richard Isaac/Rex/Shutterstock

One song, the Kinks-referencing No One’s Sleeping, was written straight after Cox heard about the killing of British MP Jo Cox by a man opposed to her stance on the EU and immigration: “Great unrest / In the country / There’s much duress / Violence has taken hold.”

“I was laying in bed with my dog, reading the news, and I was moved to stand up and groan by the frustration,” Cox says. “It’s just violence, it’s sickening.” Like many, he regards the rise of populism wearily. “Having grown up in the American south, I understand about poverty. And how poverty can leave one to feel a strange, brassy sense of dignity, and a need for one to possess one’s culture and identity. There’s an aspiration to be the ruling class, the ones who can trace their ancestry to primitive beaches. We feel entitled to a national identity, and tribalism, which is sad.” He compares us unfavourably to Faulkner and his canine friends. “When I take my dog up to the dog park, he doesn’t play with dogs of his own size or colouring or breed, he plays with all the dogs. They become a mad pack, tongues wagging, happy to be together.”

Punk’s much easier when you don’t have to wake up in the morning, and that’s who dominates punk Bradford Cox

Another song, Element, is even more stricken, seemingly taking place in a painterly nuclear apocalypse. “Humanity is like a 12-year-old who has just realised what suicide is: ‘Wait, we could actually just end it all?’ Well, everyone wants to leave if things get not fun; no one wants to stay at a party that turns foul.” He segues into free association, also his songwriting method. “Are black holes punk? Are they nihilist? Do they have safety pins through their cheeks? Is antimatter suicidal, does it possess an urge to destroy, to uncreate?”

When he first moved to Atlanta, Cox lived with an underground punk crowd and his no-fucks-given performances (including one where he covered My Sharona for an hour) have a punk attitude, but he is jaded by the snotty aesthetic that “punk” conjures. To begin with, “punk is essentially just as misogynistic as being in a frat; a lot of it really was white men creating more conniving ways to impose their self-perceived superiority on people”. Moreover, it was a culture of privilege, he says. “Punk’s much easier when you don’t have to wake up in the morning, and that’s who dominates punk. The working class wake up and they work. The punks would be very happy with all this conservative psychosis: ‘Yeah, let’s watch it burn!’ Whereas there’s no little object in this house that I haven’t worked for, and I don’t want the world to fall apart because I want my dog and I to stay here.”

So have you become more socially conscious? “Quite the opposite. I do not feel myself becoming more engaged with culture or society.”

And yet you are communing with what’s happening in that culture. “We’re living in supernatural times, and the supernatural has always appealed to me. Well, supernatural is now just referred to as genetically modified. Witchcraft is real, now. It’s patented.” He grimaces. “I just sound like a fucking Radiohead interview in 1996.” He warms to the theme, though. “They’re like the big brothers in college when I was a kid, and now I’m in college, and I’m like: ‘The world is fucked up!’ And they’re like, ‘We already knew that. We’re married with kids now, we’re happy, we’ve realised you can just settle into it.’ But I’m an apocalypse writer.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Deerhunter, with Bradford Cox, left. Photograph: PR

The final track, Nocturne, is described as “a final dispatch before ascending to heaven”, and Cox is saved from total desperation by his belief in God, “in a way that virtually no one would understand. I’m appalled by what people have done in the name of Christianity. But God’s all I’ve got because if I didn’t have that faith … Are you listening to my lyrics, this stuff that’s coming out of my mouth? I’ve not got a lot else to live for. The flowers in my garden die and are reborn in the spring; I like to hope there’s some design to this cycle.” He calls the new album “very hopeless”, so has he ever felt truly hopeless himself? “I’ve never been suicidal, if that’s the implication. I don’t find it romantic, I just find it selfish and distasteful. Hopelessness is no different from hunger or having to defecate; it’s just part of the process until the next sense of renewal. I take antidepressants, I’ve battled depression like so many others, but I wasn’t feeling hopeless when I wrote this album; I was writing this album about hopelessness. Horror is not eternal. I personally hug my dog.”

And he writes music, including superb solo albums as Atlas Sound; he rushes upstairs to show me how he works, building up a track from drums, guitar and a tone-generation machine used to test children’s hearing. A proud asexual, he says his lack of libido means “my entire world is based on aesthetic contemplation, with no distractions”. In 2016, Cox told the podcast Start Making Sense that “at 34 years old, I’m actually a virgin”. Might he ever be interested in sex? “That’s like asking a homosexual: do you think you’ll ever be interested in a woman? It’s a bit rude. The problem with society is they patted themselves on the back – which is a very white male behaviour – for accepting the homosexual, the bisexual, the transgender person, as much as they do, which leaves a lot to be desired. But no one acknowledges asexuality as an actual thing. People so often say to me: ‘Well, you just haven’t met the right person.’ As if asexuality is like having braces, they’ll come off eventually.”

Deerhunter: Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared? review – beautiful and strange desert drama Read more

Instead, he can settle into being an aesthete, and a father to his band and Faulkner. He tells me what he finds beautiful: “Designs in plastics like Bakelite, English watercolours, the bass clarinet, always the drums, really fine French paper. It’s kind of pretentious, but there is nothing more beautiful than a blank piece of paper. It’s a bit like seeing a puppy and thinking: ‘What an amazing time I’m going to have raising you.’” We head off to the park, where Faulkner runs around happily with all the other dogs.

• Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared? is out now on 4AD