Tim Carr’s (Perfume Genius, Hand Habits) path to becoming a lowkey fixture of the singer-songwriter and session player communities in Los Angeles has been persistent and lifelong. He was raised in Novato, California, a slow-paced suburb that seems locked in a landscape of endless, rolling hills. Carr’s parents encouraged him and his brother to sing along to classics by The Beatles as children, inspiring an appreciation for the value of music at a very young age. By eight, Carr was drumming on a rented kit, soon enrolling in more formal lessons and school bands. As a teenager, he wrote songs and was awestruck at figuring out how to etch grooves with the software FruityLoops. Carr’s adolescent taste for the contours of solitude — coupled with the self-described “mystical quality” of his surroundings — gently fostered a devotion to creativity.

At 18, Carr moved to Los Angeles to study jazz drums at California Institute of the Arts. “While I was there, I acquired my first home recording setup: a laptop, FL Studio, cheap interface, and mic. This set up felt like a shrine to me, where I’d go to understand the meaning of life,” he remembers. “I’d have it in my dorm room and take it home for the summer, exploring the depths of the DAW.”

Upon graduating, Carr pursued a scrappy career as a touring drummer with bands including The Americans and Fell Runner, in addition to producing for a handful of songwriters. In pockets away from the road, Carr’s introverted experiments with DIY production slowly shaped his debut, The Last Day of Fighting, which was widely released in 2016. Its eight tracks introduced a formula drawing from global folk traditions. Blossoming from a fingerprint initially tethered to rhythm, Carr began to sing in public, leaning into vulnerable, melancholic honesty beneath the spotlight.

Carr is now based in the quiet Los Angeles neighborhood of Tujunga, at the foot of the Verdugo Mountains. “Sometimes it feels like a fictional place, where there are big ideas floating around ready to be caught,” Carr muses of his current zone. His self-released latest album, Pleasure Drives, sparked shortly after the move to the Crescenta Valley. Living alone in a friend’s back house, Carr had ample space to set up equipment and make noise without worrying about bothering anyone. It coincided with the start of a romantic relationship that Carr recalls as being fueled by “brakes off hedonism.” The grainy, neon doused portrait that came to adorn the cover of Pleasure Drives also served as a muse for Carr, and the record conveys the entrancing specificity of a mesmerizing photograph.

Shimmering yet coarse around the edges, Pleasure Drives captures an essence of the golden hour. Compared to Carr’s prior output, the palette is more indebted to digital pop and home-recorded electronic music. The body of work materialized as Carr wrote and recorded in tandem — he compares the connection between the two sides of his process to a painting or film. “I really resonate to recordings that sound distinct, whether they’re highly produced or extremely lofi. I love the spectrum that can be explored here, and I think there is a fair amount of collaging these two qualities on the record,” he says of the sonic topography that defines Pleasure Drives. Hoping to retain this earthiness, Carr mixed Pleasure Drives himself. He loves the myriad ways its title album could be interpreted, erotic connotations included.

With a tendency to be extremely private, Carr speaks almost proudly of the intensity and borderline madness that birthed Pleasure Drives. Longtime collaborator Gregory Uhlmann (SML, Hand Habits, Perfume Genius, Miya Follick) contributed guitar, effects, and synthesizer to the songs “Looking At Houses” and “Alone Playing Piano,” while Jack Doutt (Cali Bellow, Meerna, Shannon Lay) handled mastering. Otherwise, it is a direct vignette of Carr’s silent but racing mind. “Pleasure drove this album to completion, as it was made from a playful place as opposed to a melancholic state or being smothered by perfectionism,” he muses. With the record approaching a broader audience, Carr braces for a return to center stage after four years in the backline —  an uneasy rush that echoes the catharsis from which Pleasure Drives emerged.