Ryley Walker is sipping a cappuccino at Gaslight Coffee, a pricey but cozy coffee spot in Logan Square, one of Chicago’s hippest neighborhoods, when he starts telling me how things used to be. “This whole block used to be empty,” he says. “I'm getting to that point where I've lived in this city long enough that I'm that doing that jaded fogey thing: ‘I remember when this was a mom and pop restaurant or an empty storefront! It wasn't always brunch!’” He asks if I ever went to a now-shuttered underground venue called the Mopery, which was located just blocks away from us.

Times change, and while Chicago’s neighborhoods have gentrified and familiar storefronts have been replaced with bougie brunch spots and four dollar coffee shops like the one we’re sitting in, Walker has also drastically changed since he moved here from Rockford—a quiet but unmotivating Illinois city 80 miles northwest known for being home to Cheap Trick—11 years ago. Though he came to the city at 17 for college, he quickly dropped out of both Columbia College Chicago and University of Illinois Chicago to, in his words, “become the scene’s annoying little brother” and make music. “I just feel like I rolled the dice and became an indie rock dude,” he says. “It's just dumb luck. By all means I should just be a fat load on a couch with my career choice being the check from a truck company that hit me or something.”

“The first fingerpicking show I did was there,” he continues. “It’s now a gym. It's funny to look up and see people running on treadmills exactly where I'd literally rip gravity bongs. Now these people are bettering their lives there?”

Throughout Walker’s career, he’s never been one to stick with a single sound. He’s done everything from specializing in noisy squall with his earliest noise bands like Heat Death, to being 60s-inspired open tuned fingerpicker, and a collaborative open-ended improviser. With his excellent fourth album Deafman Glance, out May 18 via Dead Oceans, the 28-year-old guitarist has finally settled into his own voice after years trying to find what works. In other words, when he hears the new LP’s electric and freewheeling nine songs, like the propulsive single “Opposite Middle” Noisey is premiering below, he doesn’t instantly hate it like he does his early catalog.

“What kind of psychopath likes their own music?” he muses as he bites into a scone. “How deep fried is your jalapeno popper that you like your own records? I love making music but I just hate looking back on it.”

After long bouts of playing basement noise shows and putting out fingerpicked jam sessions on small tape labels around the city, Walker’s first record 2014’s largely instrumental All Kinds Of You positioned himself as a woodsy folk bard, complete with press photo outfits that were a few steps from being Ren Faire pastiche. “I don't even remember what my first record was called,” he claims. “That and [2015’s follow-up] Primrose Green are terrible records. When you hear those two, that was just me thinking I could sing and being like, ‘I'm a fucking troubadour. Check out my pants!’ It had this whole thing that wasn't me.”