“Ode to Viceroy”, Mac DeMarco’s sun-dappled tribute to cheap cigs from his 2012 album 2, hasn’t lost its smolder. It’s probably the Brooklyn-via-Montreal singer and songwriter’s best-known tune—a laid-back guitar-pop daydream, as wobbly and welcoming as a backyard hammock—and it captures a lot of his music’s appeal. “Viceroy” is about taking pleasure in something that could kill you, and the lethal paradox is part of the draw. Somewhere in retirement, Joe Camel must be kicking himself.

This alluring ambivalence is one of DeMarco’s defining traits. He’s the gap-toothed prankster who sings the sighing love ballad. He’s the guy everybody assumes is a stoner, though he claims he never, as they say, touches the stuff. You can’t read about him without seeing the word “slacker,” but in two short years, he’s gone from opening at New York’s 550-capacity Bowery Ballroom to headlining at the 1,500-capacity Webster Hall (could he have done better if he’d tried?). The fact DeMarco isn’t even his real name—he was born Vernor Winfield McBriare Smith IV—captures the duality almost too perfectly.

Whichever Mac is the better-behaved one has been taking over more and more, as the creepy detours of 2012’s Rock and Roll Night Club EP gave way to the more direct 2. His second full-length, Salad Days, isn’t a departure from its predecessor so much as a richer, increasingly assured refinement. For all its internal contradictions, Salad Days is no more or less than a great album in a tradition of no-big-deal great albums.

There’s little here to justify DeMarco’s reputation for divisiveness (“Detractors,” as Steven Hyden put it for Wondering Sound, “tend to regard him as some kind of bullshit artist, a quintessential hipster doofus slumming it under the ironic guise of a hippie dirtbag who gleefully covers Limp Bizkit in concert”). The loping “Blue Boy”, which shares its title with an indie-pop classic by Orange Juice, amiably advises against acting so tough and worrying so much about your haircut. The warm, watery groove of “Brother” recalls the Beatles’ “Don’t Let Me Down”, though its moony lyrical sentiment (“You’re no better off living your life than dreaming at night”) might be more “I’m Only Sleeping”. You’re unlikely to hear a supposedly hip album this year with so many mentions of people’s mothers.

As with Real Estate’s Atlas, DeMarco’s new album is also ostensibly one where the chill bro gets all mature and stuff, and here his inner conflicts return with a suitably nonchalant vengeance. The title track undercuts its narrator’s worries about aging by alluding to the inconvenient truth that the worrier is only 23—not exactly ready for that condo in Florida. Relatedly, anyone hoping for a pot anthem in organ-thick “Passing Out the Pieces” will instead find a koan-like complaint about the artist life’s crummy trade-offs. Penultimate “Go Easy” suggests concern for the girlfriend left behind while on tour, but its lyrical non sequitur—“You built it up, just to knock it down”—is a common criticism of the music press that has received DeMarco so favorably and could speak to his uneasy relationship with success. Et tu, Vernor?

It’s telling that Salad Days' most immediate song, the one with biggest chance of transcending DeMarco’s cult, is one he says he didn’t want to do. “Let Her Go” was apparently the answer to label Captured Tracks’ demands for “an upbeat single” suitable for late-night TV, and DeMarco is still upset about it. He shouldn’t be: It’s an outstanding crystallization of his gifts, the real-talk advice of Jonathan Richman with a far more accessible poetic dreaminess. Of course, even this reversal of the hoary “if you love her, let her go” chestnut undermines its own advice—“Or you can keep her, it’s OK, it’s up to you,” DeMarco counters in a speak-singing outro. It’s only fitting that stick-with-the-girl songs “Let My Baby Stay” and “Treat Her Better” are almost as tunefully plush.

In this context, DeMarco’s non-album antics start to look like another defense mechanism, another way of cutting himself off at the legs before someone else does it for him. That Limp Bizkit rendition showed up as part of a jokey 2013 live release; DeMarco has been vocal about how tiresome that novelty-cover setlist (Metallica, the Police, blah blah blah) became. And he previewed Salad Days with a video for a puckish perv-pop outtake centering on a refrain of “give me pussy.” So while his slack-not-slack aesthetic may point toward rising peers like Australia’s Courtney Barnett, there’s also ample reason Odd Future lightning rod Tyler, the Creator, who cited this album’s synth-dripping “Chamber of Reflections” as DeMarco’s best song, is a fan.

"Chamber of Reflections" is something like Beach House's “Heart of Chambers”, but evoking a bare, cell-like apartment rather than a misty opium-den boudoir. It’s DeMarco’s most atmospherically exploratory track yet, and it’s also painfully lonely and quietly eloquent about the experience. So when, at the end of Salad Days' airy instrumental finale, “Jonny’s Odyssey”, he remarks, “Thanks for joining me, see you again soon, buh-bye,” you don’t wonder if you’re missing some April Fool’s joke. You want to offer the guy a light, and then you realize he already has plenty.