Tom Schecter writes music with no time for pretense. That’s not surprising, given his deep roots in New York City, where “real” is an obsession, not an adjective. Growing up against the fading background of middle-class Manhattan, Tom found he had no patience for “people pretending to be something as a means to an end.” Now, his brutal honesty cuts quick, but the wound is always cauterized with winking humor and a nod to the unbearable lightness of it all.

Schecter’s latest album, Disparition, is an opaque coming-of-age novel set over the course of those first three years after college graduation. Painted in the grays of New York but sung in the rhyme schemes of Americana, it describes his struggles with alcohol, women, and the shock of “someone all of a sudden telling me I’m an adult. Well, who am I and why the f*** didn’t they give me more details?” Songs veer from light to dark, never quite arriving at an answer but held together by the writer’s stubborn refusal to stop asking himself the hard question: “Ok, I’m better. What now?”