You don’t often run into a pop musician who peppers his conversation with heady ideas like abstraction and the subconscious, the musical value of absence and the mundanity of the most profound moments in our lives.

Like “Youth,” Wild Cub’s debut album, singer-songwriter-idealist Keegan DeWitt is all about layering. Ideas. Sounds. Imagery. Memories. Storytelling.

The quintet plays the Black Sheep on Monday.

“I don’t really get inspired by other music as much as poetry or film,” says DeWitt, who has also scored the award-winning film “Inocente,” and recent Sundance debuts “Listen Up Phillip” and “Land Ho!” “They paint in a broader way than is typical in pop music.”

Wild Cub has ridden a wave of popularity for the past year or so, he says. The album was posted online about a year ago and then picked up by their record label in December 2013. The single “Thunder Clatter,” perhaps the most melodic of “Youth,” has gained attention, and propelled the band to recent appearances on “The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon” and Conan O’Brien’s “Conan.” They’ve also been covered by the New York Times, Rolling Stone Magazine, Magnet and other publications. Right now, the band is on a nationwide tour of seemingly every gin joint and festival from one coast to the other.

It all started when DeWitt moved to Nashville to decide whether to become a singer-songwriter. There, he met Jeremy Bullock, a multi-instrumentalist playing in another band. “I didn’t want to release another album with my face and block letters,” says DeWitt, 32. “Mainly because as you get older your excitement wanes about such things. Which is a great thing.”

Bullock felt similarly and they ended up taking over his small row house, making the bedroom into a low-tech recording studio. Their aim: To create a musical screen for the listener to project their memories and feelings.

“Choosing the name Wild Cub, which is totally pointless,” he says, “and a single image on a black cover, you’re saying (to the listener) what is this for you? Taking our faces and our names off it gives people the opportunity to engage, bring all their own cool past. The night their dad died. A cool poem. All that gets wrapped up in the song, hopefully.”

DeWitt talks like that, spinning iconic stories and big ideas like a cartoon snowball rolling down a steep hill.

“Colour,” for instance, clicks along with the restlessness and hunger, the searching and accidental destructiveness of being too young to know better.

We see it in each other

It’s a black black shadow at the center of love

Back track to center, it’ll never be enough

We kill it in each other and another and another

While Wild Cub’s sound has roots in the electronic pop of the 1980s, “Youth” has more vaunted ambitions. It piles on textures (a driving backbeat of diverse sounds against vocals), contradictions (relentlessly upbeat pacing and deeply felt lyrics) and feelings (lyrics designed to put you in the head of at 15-30 year old – with all the yearning, indecision, darkness and idealism that represents.) It’s fleeting moments, he says. Putting you in that summer day, the way her hand felt in yours, the sound of the tires on the highway.

The heart of the album is the “sad little happiness,” a phrase he borrows from novelist Walter Percy.

The next album will be different, DeWitt says. Instead of building the tunes on the fly (“the entire album was written, demoed and recorded at the same time”), they’ll take their time; use the guitar or piano to write. Even so, it’s already half written. But DeWitt is not sure he’s willing to make another record.

“We’re committed to do this whole crazy tour thing that doesn’t stop until essentially Christmas Day,” he says. “Then I want to shut it down and figure out why I want to do it again. I want to make sure that I have a passion to tell another set of stories. I’m sure that it will come, but I want a chance to sit and think about it.”

WILD CUB